‘News Week,’ one of the famous news magazines of America graded ‘World 100 Global Universities’ based on openness of college, diversity of studying and research outcome. Overwhelmingly, British and American colleges took the most part of the rank for example U. S. was 43 and U. K. was 15 out of 100 among the selected universities. In Asia, colleges of Japan and Hong Kong were ranked. How many do you think Universities in Korea which have high passion in education and high rate of entering the universities than any other countries in the world would be ranked in that research? Ironically, there weren’t any Korean universities at all.

Then how is the level of Dankook University among the domestic universities? Unfortunately, DKU was evaluated as 59th among all Korean universities in ‘2008 National University Evaluation’ supported by Joong-ang Ilbo. Among the various parts of evaluation, our college made the poorest progress in ‘Internationalization part.’ English Medium Instruction (EMI) was the solution to make up for the weak point of our university. EMI means taking lectures in English.

As the matter of fact, a lot of top-ranking Korean universities started EMI 4~5 years ago and now they are enlarging it now. Many of universities carry out EMI to become a globally competitive university in our country as well as the World’s 100 Universities Rank. The main universities in Korea announced that they will raise the percentage of foreign professors and EMI as their long-term development plan. For example, Yonsei University made public that they are going to make EMI ratio from now 21.5% to 35%. KAIST is taking all the lectures in English aimed at class of students who entered university in 2007. Korea University and Sungkyunkwan University set the rule permitting students to graduate only for who took EMI over certain credits. In addition to enlarge EMI, Korea University employs new lecturers who are able to give a lecture in English and operates the training of professor-learning ability development for them. Like this, most of main universities are trying to level up their global competition to catch up overseas famous university by increasing the number of English lectures.

DKU has started EMI in every department one major course regardless of college since 2009. The Dankook Herald polled to know how the students who took EMI last semester think about it.

As you can see from the result, 70% of answered students said that they had no choice or they took it because of the evaluation method such as an absolute evaluation. Also the question about satisfaction, half of the respondents said “They feel dissatisfied with it.” On the other hand, some students took EMI to develop their English ability. Especially students who majored in English or Business and Economics have positive think about it. Moreover, 65% of respondents said they will take EMI next semester again. From that result, we can see there are also good points of EMI which was started initially in DKU even though there is some discontent as well.

How was your first EMI?

Sophomore in Dept. of English: I've got better English ability thanks to taking EMI with expressing my opinion and writing essays in English.

Freshman in Business Administration Major: I registered for EMI with high expectation but after finishing the course, I could see some professors used Korean and English simultaneity in the class at their convenient.

Junior in Dept. of Chemistry: I think teaching students their major in English is unreasonable if professors are not a native speaker or not skilled at English lecture.