Motivations, regrets, and hesitations of Bachelor’s degree students enrolling for a unilingual or multilingual degree with DMI or EMI

Usually, the language in which universities organise all or parts of their internationalised study programmes is English (English Medium Instruction - EMI) (Macaro, 2018), but there are also programmes in other foreign languages, such as Dutch Medium Instruction (DMI), i.e. programmes in Dutch in higher education where Dutch is not the L1 of the students. Although several studies have analysed the experiences of EMI students, few have focused on a learning environment in languages other than English. This study compares students’ motivations, regrets and hesitations for enrolment in a unilingual degree in French or a multilingual degree with DMI or EMI. To this end, an online survey was administered to 706 undergraduate law, political science and economics and management students at a French-speaking university in Belgium. The quantitative and qualitative data indicate that students exhibit personal, instrumental and integrative motivations (Gardner & Lambert, 1972) when selecting a unilingual or multilingual degree. Moreover, language proficiency appears as an important barrier to register for a multilingual degree. Furthermore, both DMI and EMI students primarily prioritise career prospects and linguistic factors. DMI students placed career prospects as their primary motivational factor. Another major finding was that the attractiveness for DMI is limited amongst French-speaking Belgian students. Furthermore, almost 20% of the students in the unilingual track do regret not to have registered for the multilingual programme. This study contributes to the limited research on students’ motivations for DMI alongside EMI. The results strengthen the idea that language support prior to entry and throughout DMI and EMI university programmes is needed to motivate students to enrol in multilingual degrees. The findings also provide pertinent insights for universities offering multilingual education in minority languages alongside English.

Affiliations

UCLouvainSSH/ILC/PLIN - Pôle de recherche en linguistique

Citations

APA
Chicago
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Louis, L., Degrave, P., & Hiligsmann, P. (2024). Motivations, regrets, and hesitations of Bachelor’s degree students enrolling for a unilingual or multilingual degree with DMI or EMI. INTEGRATING CONTENT AND LANGUAGE IN HIGHER EDUCATION SYMPOSIUM 2024, Wiesbaden.