[Seminar] Listen hard and listen smart/ Sihan Zhou/ CUHK

Listen hard and listen smart: Understanding students’ lecture listening difficulties and strategies in EMI higher education

Sihan Zhou

Chinese University of Hong Kong

English medium instruction (EMI) is expanding in higher education globally due to internationalization trends. For students whose first language is not English, listening to EMI lectures with new, academic information can cause cognitive overload and shallow understanding. Studies have consistently found that students struggle with a multitude of difficulties during EMI lectures, such as understanding academic or specialist vocabulary, keeping up with the lecture’s line of thought, and developing meaningful, elaborate knowledge structures to retain information. Although academic listening is challenging, it is often a neglected skill in EMI language support programs which traditionally focus on academic writing and reading. This project hence focuses on this critical yet under-researched skill of listening to reveal the struggles and strategies of students in EMI university lectures.

In this talk,…