Language Use in English-Medium Instruction at University

International Perspectives on Teacher Practice

David Lasagabaster, Aintzane Doiz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000377866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

This collection brings together insights from research and scholars' practical experience on the role of language and language use in teacher practices at the university level in EMI contexts, offering global perspectives across diverse educational settings.

The volume considers the language-related practices, processes and ways of thinking implemented in EMI contexts as teachers and students co-construct meaning through interaction while also situating these observations within the wider educational policies of institutions, societal norms and contextual pedagogies. The book highlights both the diversity and commonalities of the challenges and opportunities in enhancing student experience in different EMI contexts, drawing on international perspectives spanning South America, Europe and Asia. In so doing, the volume offers a comprehensive portrait of the current realities of the EMI experience at the university level, empowering stakeholders to critically reflect upon and adapt their classroom strategies to their own realities and chart new directions for research in the field.

The book will be of particular interest to scholars interested in issues in English-medium instruction, applied linguistics, language policy and language education, as well as those currently teaching in EMI contexts.

1An Exploratory Analysis of Language Related Episodes (LREs) in a Brazilian EMI Context

Lecturers’ and Students’ Perspectives

Ron Martinez, Paola Machado and Candida Palma

Introduction

As an object of research interest, EMI can be considered a relative latecomer to the discipline of applied linguistics. Ernesto Macaro in his 2018 volume on EMI, for example, reports only 16 published studies before the year 2000, noting a lack of even a mention of EMI in pre-twenty-first-century reviews of Content Based Instruction (CBI) (Macaro, 2018: 3). Indeed, there is still much to be understood about EMI and how it relates to other more widely studied and well-established concerns in applied linguistics related to CBI, such as Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and even English for Specific Purposes (ESP) (Airey, 2016).

One aspect of EMI that most typically characterizes it as being different from those other related fields of inquiry is its relative absence of explicit linguistic aims. In other words, whereas in CBI, CLIL, ESP and so on there is usually some explicit attention to language, the “E” in EMI is supposedly not a central concern: “‘(l)earning in English’ is not the same as ‘learning English’, and teaching in English is not at all the same as teaching English” (Carroll, 2015: 35, emphasis added). By the same token, although EMI lecturers often report that they do not see their role as subject teachers as one conflated with language teaching – indeed nor do they so desire (Airey, 2012; Aguilar, 2017) – clearly they also hope that their students benefit from their classes in a kind of “two-for-one” deal: students can study their discipline, and also gain domain-specific literacy in English (Başıbek et al., 2014; Dafouz, 2018; Kim & Tatar, 2017; Turhan & Kırkgöz, 2018; Yeh, 2012). At the same time, even though they do not see themselves as language instructors, EMI lecturers also report worries as to students’ ability to cope in English (Belhiah & Elhami, 2014; Byun et al., 2011; Doiz, Lasagabaster & Sierra, 2011; Gyong & Kim, 2014; Hu & Lei, 2014). Put another way, EMI lecturers often report an unwillingness to concern themselves with matters of language, yet language itself is frequently also expressed as a concern.

There is thus a kind of paradoxical relationship that EMI lecturers appear to have with respect to their view of themselves and their role: on the one hand, they clearly do not see themselves as language teachers, but it is also clear that language is not “off the table” completely. As mentioned, it is widely reported that lecturers do expect that their classes make a positive language-related contribution to their students’ learning. Indeed, that expectation is also often reported by the students themselves (Huang, 2015; Jane Lee, 2014; Yeh, 2014) – yet students also do not ascribe a role of “language teacher” to their EMI lecturers (Airey, 2016; Dearden, 2018; Grift, Meijer & van der Salm, 2019). Nonetheless, it may be important to understand the extent to which the English language does become a focus in EMI settings, since the goal of “improving English” is widely cited as one of the main reasons for institutions implementing (and students taking) courses in English in the first place (Baker & Hüttner, 2017; Chapple, 2015; Chen, Ellen & Kraklow, 2015; Hu, Li & Lei, 2014; Jiang, Zhang & May, 2019). In any case, as argued by Hüttner (2019: 10), “there is a fundamental integration of language and content learning” that “cannot be viewed as separate monoliths.” Airey (2016: 73) echoes this sentiment in the context of defining putative boundaries among EAP, CLIL and EMI: “In real...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Foregrounding Language Issues in English-Medium Instruction Courses
• Chapter 1: An Exploratory Analysis of Language Related Episodes (LREs) in a Brazilian EMI Context: Lecturers’ and Students’ Perspectives
• Chapter 2: Analysing EMI Teachers’ and Students’ Talk about Language and Language Use
• Chapter 3: EMI Teachers’ Use of Interactive Metadiscourse in Lecture Organisation and Knowledge Construction
• Chapter 4: Strategies to Enhance Comprehension in EMI Lectures: Examples from the Italian Context
• Chapter 5: EMI Materials in Online Initial English Language Teacher Education
• Chapter 6: Pronunciation in EMI: A Preliminary Study of Spanish University Students’ Intelligibility and Comprehensibility
• Chapter 7: Students’ Language-Related Challenges of Studying through English: What EMI Teachers Can Do
• Chapter 8: Challenges of English-Medium Higher Education: The First-Year Experience in Hong Kong Revisited a Decade Later
• Chapter 9: Implementing EMI in Higher Education: Language Use, Language Research and Professional Development
• Chapter 10: Epilogue: Disciplinary Literacies as a Nexus for Content and Language Teacher Practice