Due to the aforementioned changes in forest-based industries in Finland, it was deemed necessary to implement an EMI Master’s program in the Department of Forest Products Technology at the former Helsinki University of Technology (TKK), now Aalto University5. This change was not seen only as positive, and especially students who had already begun their Bachelor’s level studies felt the change could create problems (Pynnönen, 2005).
The illustration below (Figure 1.2) depicts the above mentioned Master’s Program. The small circles inside the larger oval illustrate various activities, such as lectures, laboratory exercises, thesis presentations, and other similar academic functions within this Master’s Program. This illustration will be used in Section 3.2.3 to show how the research data was first selected and then categorized. Here it provides an idea how this Master’s Program was viewed in its neutral state, at the beginning of this study.
5 Aalto University was established 2010 through a merger of three Finnish universities: Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki University of Technology, and The University of Arts and Design Helsinki. Further information available at http://www.aalto.fi/en/about/.
Figure 1.2 Depiction of a Master’s Program with its Various Activities in its Neutral State
The mentioned activities can be seen as different genres (further details on this in Section 2.1.1) which are in use and are formed within the Master’s Program.
Since this EMI Master’s Program was partially funded by the Forest-based Industries (FBI) (Mauno et al., 2007), these funds allowed the program developers to assemble supportive measures in order to help both students and lecturers in this new situation. One of these measures was to hire a support person for English to assist lecturers with their lecture materials and to organize English courses for both the general personnel and specifically for the lecturers.
Though industry was a strong supporter of the new, EMI Master’s Program, several other aspects also influenced the development of this Master’s Program. These are depicted in Figure 1.3.
Figure 1.3 Administrative, Educational, and Societal Aspects Related to the Master’s Program This Master’s Program was one of the first EMI programs at TKK and still the only one where teaching is only in English, with no parallel courses run in either Finnish or Swedish67. Due to the administrative, educational, and societal aspects, and the industry-provided funding, the program developers were able to develop a program with various support structures. These structures enhanced the implementation of the program.
At this point, I was asked to provide the department workshops, individual tutoring and other such means to help the personnel with their English use in terms of the new Master’s Program. Based on my previous work experience within Forest-based Industries (FBI), I had a notion of what would be expected of the engineers graduating and finding work within FBI, I conducted a survey among the members of Paper Association Engineers. This
6 Finnish and Swedish are the official languages in Finland. http://www.om.fi/20802.htm
7The TKK General Degree Regulation Chapter 8, Section 62 (Dec. 13, 2004) states that the language of studies can be English only, when so confirmed by the program.
on-line survey gathered information on the respondents’ use of English and whether they encountered problems with it. The results of this survey confirmed my expectations: most respondents used English daily or weekly, mostly with non-native speakers of English, and mostly for spoken language (Suviniitty, 2007)8. From this perspective, EMI seemed to serve its purpose.
From covering the potential future for the students once they enter the working world, I had to investigate their present as well. Thus, as the support person, next I was to “evaluate the lecturers’ English”, which is how the task was described by the Head of the Department. In order to do that, I video-recorded twenty-two lectures and gathered students’ feedback on each videoed lecture immediately after the lecture on paper-based questionnaires. Since the subject matter discussed during the lectures was not within my expertise, I felt that, in addition to my view on these lectures, it was appropriate to obtain the target audience’s perception on the lectures as well. The material gathered in this manner is the data for the present study.
The student feedback gathered was primarily used to rank the investigated lectures. The lectures were ranked from challenging to accessible based on students’ feedback on the questionnaires. After this, three challenging lectures and three accessible lectures were transcribed. This allowed a more thorough investigation of the discourse features which were located, described, and analyzed with methods deriving from discourse analysis. My goal was to determine what discourse features were used and whether they were used differently in the challenging and accessible lectures as well as to see whether the presence of dialogue between the lecturer and the students in the lecture would influence its accessibility.
Lectures themselves can be defined as a specific genre. According to Swales (1990), genre is realized in discourse communities with a mutual communicative goal. This definition
8 Available online: http://icee2007.dei.uc.pt/proceedings/papers/211.pdf
matches with what takes place in lectures. Although there are cultural differences regarding how students and lecturers view lectures, Mauranen (2006:105) points out that despite the differences, common features are also found in lectures as well as in their use in academia.
Previous studies on similar data have either included both self-collected material as well as existing corpus data, or only the latter (e.g. Fortuño, 2006). Some studies have used naturally occurring speech while others have resorted to simulated speech events (e.g.
Lesznyák, 2004). The present study was conducted for a pragmatic purpose and is based on self-collected, naturally occurring speech in lectures, with student feedback on lectures. It, therefore, provides a multi-level approach to EMI.
There are also studies addressing comprehension (Mason, 1994; Chaudron et al., 1994), several of them focusing on NS lecturers, NNS audiences. Some have concluded that lectures held in the audience’s native language would ensure better comprehension (Hellekjaer, 2010; Airey, 2009). The present study also examines two lectures held in Finnish, the native language of both these lecturers and the audiences. These two lecturers were the same ones included in the EMI investigation where they lectured in an ELF situation with international students present. In two instances, these lecturers knew they would not have international students attending and, thus, they chose to lecture in Finnish.
The objective of video-recording the Finnish lectures was to determine whether the use of discourse features in those lectures held in ELF and these held in Finnish differed in some way.
In addition to being a dissertation, this study is an extended report on an investigation which began in 2005 with video-recording lectures and collecting student feedback “to evaluate the lecturers’ English.” Naturally, this study should be of interest to the evaluated lecturers and the department as a whole. Regardless of the subject matter, the present study should interest all tertiary-level lecturers to see how students view interaction and interactional features in lectures and how we can improve students’ perceptions of lecture comprehensibility.