Outcome-Based Language Teaching in EMI Listening: Balancing Accountability With Ungraded Supports for Low-Proficiency Learners

Abstract

Listening plays a critical yet undertheorized role in English-medium instruction (EMI), where subject courses are taught through English rather than learners’ first language, and access to disciplinary knowledge relies heavily on real-time comprehension of lectures and academic tasks not designed for language development. For low-proficiency students enrolled in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programmes, this creates a high-stakes learning condition in which assessment-driven accountability can intensify cognitive and affective pressure. While outcome-based education (OBE) offers curricular structure and transparency, it is frequently criticized for privileging measurable outcomes over sustained engagement and long-term skill development. This study examines how accountability in EMI listening courses can be structurally balanced with ungraded pedagogical supports to foster engagement and learning sustainability. Drawing on a three-year longitudinal reform of a compulsory elective EMI listening course, the study analyses how a design approach integrating graded accountability with collaborative learning, voluntary practice, and reflective work reshaped learners’ engagement and learning trajectories. Using a mixed-methods design combining descriptive and inferential quantitative analyses with thematic analysis of learner reflections, integrated through triangulation, the analysis synthesizes performance data, engagement logs, and learner reflections collected from 533 low-proficiency STEM learners across three cohorts. Findings indicate that assessment-driven designs alone were insufficient to support learning progression in EMI listening. When graded accountability was complemented by ungraded, low-risk supports, learners demonstrated reduced failure risk, sustained voluntary engagement, and heightened reflective awareness of listening strategies and goals. Listening was increasingly construed not as a short-term course requirement, but as a transferable academic skill. The study contributes to EMI and language teaching research by theorizing EMI listening as a pedagogically constrained condition and by illustrating how OBE can be enacted as a supportive, rather than compliance-oriented, design. The findings offer transferable design principles for balancing accountability with ungraded pedagogical supports in EMI listening courses beyond the immediate institutional context.