Perceptions and Attitudes of Students towards Multilingual Practices in an EMI STEM Classroom at Two Kazakhstani Universities

Abstract

Having emphasized higher education (HE) as a source for preparing internationally competitive human capital, Kazakhstan has internationalized its HE and introduced English as a medium of instruction (EMI) as part of its trilingual education policy, which implies providing tertiary education in Kazakh, Russian and English. This study aims at exploring undergraduate students' multilingual practices employed at one of the EMI science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) course classrooms and their perceptions and attitudes towards them at two different universities in Kazakhstan. To understand the reasons behind their perceptions and attitudes, a qualitative interview-based case-study approach was employed to answer the following research questions that guided the study: 1. What is the language-in-education policy in Kazakhstan and why is it so? 2. What are the students’ perceptions of multilingual practices in an EMI STEM and why? 3. What are the attitudes of students towards multilingual practices and why? To explore the central phenomenon, eight participants from biology majors were recruited from two Kazakhstani universities using a combination of homogenous, convenience and snowball sampling strategies. The findings of the study revealed that students held monolingual ideologies in both universities despite their actual practice of translanguaging (code-switching and translation) between languages for both formal and informal learning. Although university policies differ, students reported practicing the same multilingual practices due to such global processes as internationalization and globalization, as well as the national policy development and labor market requirements; but attitudes towards such practices vary depending on each individual’s ideologies and beliefs about a language. Education stakeholders such as teachers and language policy makers may benefit from the findings of this research in that these could enable them to adjust multilingual pedagogy and university language policies taking into account students’ attitudes towards languages in teaching and learning in English-medium instruction courses.