STUDENTS' PRACTICES ON ENGLISH AS A MEDIUM OF INSTRUCTION IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL: A QUALITATIVE STUDY

Abstract

Students’ Practices on English as a Medium of Instruction in a Public School: A Qualitative Study connected to analyze and interpret the data collected from interviews and classroom observation. The study's findings revealed that learners want to practice the English language with their peers and subject teachers in their learning. Furthermore, they wanted to enhance English competency due to its practical value in the linguistic marketplace. However, they are deprived of such opportunity due to most of the subject teachers practice Nepali in classroom discourse and adaptation of traditional teaching methods like grammar-translation and teacher center in classroom teaching. Students' adaptation of Nepali to impart the information to their peers and subject teachers is not only the cause of low English proficiency. Subject teachers' limited use of English for reading subject content and Nepali for discussion and interaction are the major causes. Though students feel comfortable and easy to learn subject content in the Nepali Medium, they negatively perceive the excessive use of Nepali in the classroom. Since students cannot expose the subject content orally and in written form in English what they comprehend in Nepali, they experience that using Nepali as a Medium of instruction brings more harm than benefit in the EMI classroom. Besides, the finding shows that students favor English Medium or code-switching as strategies for subject teachers in EMI classrooms. Along with this, the school lacked proper planning, policy, and management before the introduction of EMI. Implementing EMI in the absence of a clear policy prepares learners to fit neither English nor Nepali medium for their higher study in the future.