| dc.description.abstract | The present study focuses on the International Master’s Degree Programs
(IMDP) of the University of Jyväskylä and issues related to English-medium
instruction (EMI). At the core of the present study are the IMDP students’
conceptualizations of, and reflections on, academic English. Furthermore, the
study examines the IMDP students’ reported language gains in academic
English as well as the internal and external factors to which the students’
attribute these gains, or the lack of them. In order to map out these aspects, 15
IMDP students were interviewed at the end of their two-year program. These
interviews were then analyzed inductively with the help of Atlas.ti software
and by adhering to the guidelines of qualitative content analysis (QCA). As a
result, five main themes, with various subthemes, emerged, and they were
reflected on through the lens of the participants’ overall academic performance
(e.g. graduation time and master’s thesis grade) in order to gain further insights
into the students’ study paths. Consequently, as a result it was discovered that
the students have rather narrow and even slightly decontextualized,
conceptualizations of academic English. Moreover, the importance of students’
entry level of academic English, as well as their own role and effort, were
deemed crucial. The students, however, also highlighted the importance of
adequate language support, which the majority of them found was not, in
practice, realized in their IMDPs. Based on these results, a far more close-knit
and systematic integration of content and language is proposed as a means to
better support the students’ IMDP studies, which are inherently a combination
of both content and language. The present study also proposes academic
literacy/ies as an approach for bringing content and language closer together
along the IMDP students’ study path. Namely, integrating all these aspects
would enable students to become even more profoundly members of their
academic community and discourse, and thus contribute to their overall
expertise in their field and their mastery of academic literacies. | fi |
