Undertaking the center's purpose of conducting EMI workshops since the 2016 school year—to cultivate teachers' English skills and promote the internationalization of the campus—the first "EMI Master Workshop" of this semester was held by Xu Xiaoling from the Foreign Language Education Group of the Joint Education Committee on September 29. The teacher kicked off the workshop. In the workshop, the teachers and students were introduced to the background of EMI and related implementation strategies, and activities were organized in groups so that all participating teachers could further understand EMI.
Just like the beginning of each class, Mr. Xu took the icebreaker activity (breaking the ice) as the first step of the workshop. He asked the participating teachers to draw interests, influential people and things in life, etc., on the small whiteboard of the teaching aids; in the process of getting to know each other, slowly lead to the topic through easy activities. Teacher Xu explained that in many English-taught classes, the most common problem teachers encounter is students' fear of an all-English environment. Lectures taught entirely in English may discourage students from speaking or attempting to converse in Chinese with the instructor during recess. Therefore, students' confidence in their English ability will be essential when conducting EMI. EMI means "in countries whose native language or first language is not English, the teaching method of teaching subject courses with English as the main language for students whose native language is not English" is used in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and other places. Most of the purposes of the methods have the connotation of internationalization and globalization, hoping that domestic students will be more competitive in the future. This teaching method has been implemented in many countries, ranging from elementary schools to universities; according to research, although the education sector is mainly committed to EMI, it still needs to improve its implementation. Not all academic units implementing EMI fully agree with this teaching method. For example, suppose the content taught by the teacher is a professional subject. In that case, the English proficiency of the teachers and students in the class may directly or indirectly affect the teaching results. Therefore, the content that teachers expect to teach may be different or have additional restrictions in the curriculum due to the import of EMI.
