Matthew Muscat-Inglott

In this paper, we explore the effects of English as a medium of instruction in Maltese further vocational education settings, in the context of inclusive educational practice. Given the existing heterogeneity of English proficiency among students in Malta, our study aimed to investigate the association between English language proficiency and overall academic performance in a local vocational education and training institution. Using a generally postpositivist approach, quantitative survey design incorporating a standardised English proficiency assessment, followed by a descriptive and inferential statistical analysis of the data, we found little evidence to support the notion that English proficiency and overall academic achievement were correlated. While students reportedly perceived certain difficulties in their studies as a result of English-medium instruction, this had no adverse effect on their grades. While our findings do suggest a proclivity for inclusive practice, we also suspect that grading practices may be favouring content knowledge over language proficiency, possibly at the expense of field-specific and general English language mastery. Further research is needed to understand the interrelationships between English proficiency and inclusive educational practices in local vocational settings.

In spite of recent progress in the area, Malta scored just below the EU-27 average in a recent European report on gender inequality. Among the key issues flagged, were uneven concentrations of women and men in education, as well as gaps in employment and unadjusted pay. This paper explores some of the prospective underlying mechanisms continuing to drive such forms of inequity in Malta, with a special focus on sex-segregation in further and higher education. An empirical, quantitative research methodology based on various forms of contingency table analysis was selected, combined with a Popperian post-positivist approach to null hypothesis-testing. Binary logistic and log-linear modelling techniques were applied to secondary public data from the Maltese National Statistics Office, on the distributions of student and worker populations by sex and field from the 2016/17 academic year. The findings showed that Maltese women in the academic track were more than twice as likely to challenge gender stereotypes by taking up traditionally masculine-labelled courses than their peers in the vocational tracks. Women in the academic track were also less likely to end up in feminine-labelled roles in the workplace. The Maltese further and higher education system was nonetheless heavily sex-segregated overall when compared to the workplace, with Maltese women three times as likely to find themselves in feminine-labelled fields at college or university, than they were at work. Declining occupational sex-segregation was interpreted within the context of ever-increasing competition for available work, and thereby construed as a symptom of the devaluation of labour power inherent in capital-labour relations. In an increasingly neoliberalist and gender-essentialist ideological climate, the paper goes on to argue that such a devaluation places women, specifically, at heightening risk of intensifying capitalist exploitation, engendering a heightened impetus towards emancipatory curricular reform, and authentic system-wide deconstruction of enduring gender stereotypes in Maltese further and higher education.