A proposal for emi lecturers' professional development program in Turkish higher education

Turkey is one of the countries where the English medium of instruction (EMI) has become common. In Turkish universities, EMI has been increasingly practiced at tertiary level, and post-graduate programs have been run fully or partially in English. One of the most important factors determining the quality of EMI implementation is the professional development level of EMI lecturers. The present study aims to porpose an EMI professional development program by providing an in-depth understanding of how EMI lecturers perceive EMI, professional development, their needs in EMI through a qualitative case study in the Turkish Higher Education context. Selected through purposeful sampling technique, thirty voluntary EMI lecturers working in private and public EMI institutions were interviewed. The obtained data were analysed through content analysis via NVivo 12. The findings of the study revealed insights about lecturers' perspectives over EMI, their EMI course process, EMI lecturers' key competencies, their professional development needs and preferences regarding a professional development program. For instance, in terms of benefits lecturers agree that EMI is a gate to scientific knowledge while it is challenging to teach and learn in a foreign language. Second, EMI lecturers' experience with EMI has been identified as their course process and course problems. It has been revealed that EMI lecturers mainly do not use a specific method and technique and as material they mostly use power point presentations. While managing the class, they tend to prefer to motivate students, and EMI lecturers both from social sciences and hard sciences commonly employ multiple choice exams to assess students. Their course problems are centered around learner related, lecturer related and system related problems. Additionally, key competencies such as pedagogical competences, linguistic competences, personal competences and academic field competence have bben revealed, and perceived self competences have been delineated as strengths and weaknesses particularly for Turkish context. Analysis of the data also uncoveres that EMI lecturers unanimously agree there is no institutional EMI professional development practice and they need EMI professional development practices aiming at improving their aforementioned competences. Few lecturers experienced systematic professional development practice, while the majority had professional development experience mainly based on observation by senior colleagues and the master-apprentice relationship. As a result, a professional development program has been proposed drawing upon the program design steps in Taba model for EMI lecturers taking into account their perspectives, needs, challenges about EMI and the EMI literature. The proposed program consists of objectives, content, main tools, practical and technical characteristics and supplementary tools for EMI professional development. In the content of the program, mainly pedagogical issues and language issues came to the fore. As for the tools of EMI PD program, demo course and feedback, mentoring, case-based learning and workshops were substantially suggested. For the implementation of the program, practical characteristics which refer to attendance and motivation of the participants, providers, execution and evaluation of the program were displayed in detail, along with the technical characteristics of the program such as participants, duration, medium, place and time. The present study, thus, calls for additional attention to EMI professional development program and implementation on the part of policy makers. Accordingly, implications such as contribution to the development of EMI lecturers in linguistic and pedagogical terms and directions such as research engagement of EMI lecturers for future research are also provided.