Students' And Teachers' Perceptions And Attitudes Towards English-medium Instruction At High School International Department

English has become increasingly popular as an international language over the past 30 years as a result of globalization.Therefore,in order to meet the needs of internationalization,a growing number of middle schools around the world adopt English as the medium of instruction(EMI)and establish the international department to enhance their competitiveness and to attract students.In addition,with the development of exchange and cooperation between Chinese secondary schools and foreign educational institutions,an increasing number of opportunities have been created for those ambitious students who want to study abroad at an early age.This tendency has attracted increasing attention from language teachers to scholars in researching on the EMI program.In recent years,a large number of studies have been conducted both at home and abroad on the EMI courses in tertiary education context,but very few are found surrounding China' secondary education.Therefore,a study on the EMI courses taken by the Chinese senior high school students studying in international department has great significance in practice.Under this background,this study took the high school students' EMI courses at two senior high schools in Kunming as an example.It also involves 54 students from international department,6 Chinese teachers and 4 native English teachers who conducting EMI courses now.The study was designed to explore the students and teachers' attitudes towards EMI courses,students' opinions on subject content learning and English improvements as well as the teachers' difficulties in EMI teaching.Quantitative and qualitative methods were adopted,including questionnaire survey and semi-structured interview in data collection.The quantitative data were coded and analyzed by using SPSSS22.0.The results showed that:1)The native English speaking teachers had positive attitudes towards teaching the EMI courses,and their attitudes towards the content in those courses were also positive in general,but they still expected to see more diligence and enthusiasm from their students;2)Students also express certain compliments to the current EMI courses and had overall positive attitudes towards studying the EMI courses,although a small group of students voiced some complains about course arrangement and class atmosphere;3)Students acknowledged that both the subject contents learning and English improvements could benefit from EMIstudying,but most of them put more emphasis on the improvement of English proficiency;4)Difficulties and challenges of these high school students stemmed from their own inadequate English proficiency and unreasonable course arrangement.Based on the results of this survey,the thesis puts forward some suggestions for improving effectiveness and efficiency of the EMI teaching on areas including entrance requirements,class grouping,authorities' supervision and home-school cooperation,etc.The study ends with the limitation of this study and suggestions for further research,which emanate from the limited amount of time,as well as small samples size and so on.Future studies on this topic could reduce these limitations and explore the implementing of the EMI courses in secondary level from different points of view.