English Vocabulary Levels of University Engineering Students in a Sino-NZ Collaboration

Internationalization of China's higher education has been widely documented. A New Zealand university entered the crowded market and found that some things have not changed. English Medium Instruction (EMI) is the buzzword but are the engineering students at a “provincial or local university” ready for it? This paper will discuss an exploratory study on the English productive vocabulary levels of the engineering students in a Sino-New Zealand collaboration. Students' written work were analyzed using the online vocabulary profiler (VocabProfiler). Preliminary results suggest that participants' productive vocabulary levels were below the authors' expectations. This was consistent with other standards described in the literature. Pedagogical implications include the review of teaching resources and more emphasis placed on the vocabulary development of students, particularly for the academic and engineering words. In addition, more research needs to be conducted to identify other challenges faced by the engineering students.