Investigating the English advantage in the Indonesian workplace and its implications to EMI education (2019, forthcoming)

Franklin G. Talaue

English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Bina Nusantara University

Moo Kung Kim

International Business Program, Management Department, BINUS Business School International

   “English is the real global language and is important in education, relations and business. I am the Chairman of one of the largest Italian Bank Foundations and we are dealing with more than 100 countries. Our work language is English.”

Professor Francesco Profumo, Politecnico di Torino, Italy.

  “English is the language of international business, so increasingly it is just as important for businesses in native and non-native English-speaking countries.”

Cambridge English Language Assessment

Abstract

The exponential growth of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in countries where English is either a second or foreign language has been problematized in an ever-growing literature on the subject because of effectiveness and generalizability which, as this paper argues, might have been a result of a methodological myopia in terms of choosing respondent cohorts or sectors through which EMI is studied. Making use of the Indonesian context, this research, therefore, would like to investigate the perception of graduates of one EMI university in Jakarta on how English has helped them navigate workplace English language requirements and how their self-perceived proficiencies in the English language affect or impact their task performance, communication, and organizational leadership or influence. The study will make use of an exploratory sequential mixed methods approach in which the results of a correlation analysis of ordinal and interval scale questions are used in a consequent qualitative analysis as informed by semi-structured interview data of a sub-set of the respondents.

This article has been accepted at The 17th Asia TEFL International Conference(ELT for Glocal Synergies across Disciplines and Multilingual Ambiences) will be held in Bangkok, Thailand June, 2019.