39
7 Quantitative study
40
- Studying in English prepares / would prepare me for an international workplace;
- Studying in English familiarises / would familiarise me with English on a daily basis;
- Studying in English allows / would allow me to acquire technical terminology.
The presence of the last four items among those with very high means indicates that the practical advantages of EMI in terms of language learning seem obvious to most informants.
EMI is considered an educational setting favouring language learning and preparing students for an active use of English language skills.
Then, correlations between each individual item and the total scale were explored by visual means, and items that were in a non-monotonic relation with the total scale were excluded, as this type of relation indicates an absence of correlation. The following step consisted in generating a correlation matrix to investigate inter-item correlations, using Kendall’s tau, as the scores are non-normally distributed and, in most cases, in non-linear relations with the total score for the scale. Items that did not correlate with most other items were dropped and those with the highest mean correlation coefficients were kept. The standardised Cronbach’s alpha for the scale, the corrected item-scale coefficients and the Cronbach’s alphas if each item was dropped were then computed, leading to results proving the solidity of the construct, now reduced to 12 items, and its internal consistency, as can be seen in table 4.
Table 4. Reliability analysis for “Attitude”. Item-total statistics
Item Corrected
item-total correlation
Cronbach Alpha if item deleted 1. I can imagine myself following all my current classes in
English.
.81 .93
2. I can imagine myself taking all my exams in English. .80 .93 3. I can imagine myself writing my thesis in English. .81 .93 4. A high level of English is necessary for further studies or
for my future job.
.78 .93
5. The things I want to do in the future require me to use English.
.68 .94
6. I have to master English because without a high proficiency I cannot be recognised as being good in my field.
.62 .94
41 7. Students should be required to take a certain number of
modules taught in English.
.57 .94
8. Academic standards fall when the medium of instruction is English(*).
.63 .94
9. I enjoy or would enjoy classes taught in English. .77 .93 10. I am interested in following classes taught in English. .80 .93 11. I would prefer to follow classes in my mother tongue(*). .75 .93 12. I think that having an English-speaking diploma is better
for my future.
.67 .94
Cronbach Alpha for the 12 items .94
Items 1 to 3 address students’ perception of their chance of success in an EMI setting by assessing their ability to picture themselves as active EMI students; items 4 to 6 are related to the perceived necessity of English as a language of instruction and show the importance of the necessity of English for students’ future in the construct; items 7 and 8 reflect the perceived legitimacy of EMI; items 10 to 12 relate to the willingness to enrol on EMI programmes. It should be noted that more than half of the questions had to be excluded for the construct to be reliable. This may point to the fact that the questionnaire might benefit from modification and should be further worked on. The advantages and disadvantages of the construct are discussed in section 7.3.1. The perceived legitimacy of EMI, in particular, did not yield results that correlated strongly with the scale, except from items 7 and 8. The lack of consistency between items concerned with legitimacy and the total score on the scale highlights a contrast between researchers’ and students’ concerns. Whilst researchers warn against domain loss (Wilkinson 2013: 11-13; Phillipson 2007; Ammon & McConnell 2002), answers related to this issue did not correlate with the attitudinal scale and had to be excluded from the construct. This may be explained either by a lack of awareness of issues of domain loss on the part of students or by the fact that, albeit aware of these issues, students are more influenced by practical matters, such as the benefits of studying in EMI or the necessity of English. These interpretations will further be discussed in the qualitative analysis of students’ interviews (see chapter 8).
With regard to the other scales, they were only tested for internal consistency. This led to the exclusion of the scale measuring motivation, whose standardised alpha was below .70 (α = .59) and would not have been improved by removing items. The lack of internal consistency in the motivation scale can be explained by the differences between the settings in which the
42
scale proved to be valid and the present setting. Items were mainly inspired by the AMTB (Gardner 1985a) and by Ryan’s (2009) study. Both studies were targeted at less proficient language learners. In contrast, participants in this study reported high levels of proficiency and, therefore, they probably consider themselves language users rather than language learners. Besides, most participants indicate that EMI does not impact negatively on their grades, which probably points out that students do not consider proficiency an issue in Belgium and in Norway, as opposed to findings in Tatzl (2011)’s and Hu & Lei (2014)’s studies, and the fears expressed in Ljosland (2011). For this reason, questions about dedicating time and energy to mastering the language may have seemed confusing to informants. The BIMC5 item (International mobility is not important to me as part of my study plans) had to be removed from the possible self scale, as it was impacting negatively on the consistency of the scale. Imagined community might thus be independent from plans of studying abroad: belonging to an international imagined community does not require students to plan study trips. This idea seems in line with Park & Abelmann’s (2004) findings in the Korean context, and this shows that the cosmopolitan striving is distinct from the practical instrumental goal of moving abroad. Cronbach alpha’s and descriptive statistics (minima, maxima, medians and median absolute deviations, i.e. MAD, as the scores are non-normally distributed) are provided for all scales in table 5.
Table 5. Cronbach Alpha and descriptive statistics for each scale
Attitude Language anxiety
Imagined community
Possible self
Self-efficacy beliefs
EMI class anxiety
Cronbach α .94 .92 .78 .85 .93 .91
Median 3.58 2 4.25 3.6 4.14 2
MAD .99 1.48 .74 .89 1.06 1.19
Minimum 1 1 1 1 1 1
Maximum 5 5 5 5 5 5
As regards the statistics, the ideal case scenario would have been to have enough data points to generate a regression model, which would allow for the calculation of the relative weights of each independent variable on students’ attitudes, simultaneously controlling for the remaining variables. However, the small amount of data does not provide solid ground to generate such a model. The research questions have thus been isolated and each variable has
43 been tested separately. In spite of this limitation, the statistical tests provide a good basis for a preliminary discussion of the issues highlighted in the literature review. Associations between each variable, participants’ countries, and EMI participation are commented upon as well. In the following sections, statistical results for each research question are presented and discussed scale by scale. In the discussion section, I then attempt to explain these results as a coherent whole by linking insights provided by individual scales together.