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Research on Effective Teaching Methods for English-medium Instruction Computer Networking Course

Chinese universities have been strongly supported by government to promote English-Medium Instruction (EMI) in the past two decades. While EMI is not simply translating lecture contents into English, the teaching methods should be adjusted accordingly. This study aims at seeking effective EMI teaching methods for engineering courses, taking the case of Computer Networking course in Shanghai Maritime University. Several computer-aided teaching methods have been practised, including interactive teaching with Rain Classroom, class demonstration with Wireshark and Packet Tracer, video review, online teaching resources, and hands-on projects. Based on our teaching experience, a 3-step interactive teaching routine was set up and practiced. The comparing result of three consecutive years’ final exam scores and labs scores show an overall improvement of the students’ learning outcomes. An online questionnaire was designed to investigate the students’ opinions on teaching contents and methods. The collected survey results and feedbacks show that most of the students approve of our EMI teaching methods. But there are up to 27.5% students who still consider EMI academic course is difficult. The cross comparative result of the online students’ survey reveals that the students’ previous EMI experience greatly affects their perceived level of difficulty. It should be very helpful to offer an introductory EMI course or an ESP (English for Special Purpose) course for the engineering freshmen to prepare them for the follow-up EMI academic courses.