Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 44, Issue 2, 2021

As part of the trend toward internationalization of higher education, governments and universities have introduced policies to encourage the expansion of English-medium instruction (EMI). However, top-down policies do not necessarily translate to teaching and learning practices. This article provides a case study examining the implementation of undergraduate EMI engineering programs at a state university in Turkey to explore the gaps that exist between national- and institutional-level EMI policies and classroom-level practices. Data were collected through policy documents, classroom observations, semi-structured interviews with teachers, and focus group discussions with students. The findings suggest that the implementation of EMI varies across classrooms, even within the same university department. Despite policies that envision one-language-at-a-time instruction, the EMI lecturers in this study varied in terms of language preference and teaching practice in their EMI lectures. Implications are discussed with respect to policy planning, teacher training, and the expansion of EMI across university contexts.

The advancement of English as an instrument for the internationalization of higher education has foregrounded English as an academic lingua franca (EALF), and the case of China is no exception. This study focuses on the process by which EALF has been interpreted and negotiated across university policies and local practices in China’s internationalized higher education. Drawing upon nexus analysis and multisource data, the study traced the discursive (re)location of EALF across different scales of social activity related to multilingualism at an English-medium transnational university in China. Our analysis illustrates the tension between English and other co-existing languages, as presented in educational language policies and as perceived and practiced by multilingual students in the local communicative context. The findings also show an interactive policymaking process through which students and university administrators opened ideological and implementational spaces that linguistically and semiotically pluralized communicative scenarios at the internationalized university in focus.

This paper draws on a small-scale qualitative study with international students enrolled in various English- and Chinese-medium instruction programs in Chinese universities. It seeks to explore these students’ educational experiences and their perceptions of China and China’s higher education. Our study provides ample evidence about the irrelevance of Chinese language in the current policies and practices of Chinese universities regarding internationalization and international students. It also counters earlier studies that show how deeply rooted the discourses of native speaker and native-speaking varieties of English are in English-medium-instruction programs around the world. All in all, the paper makes theoretical and empirical contributions to the emerging literature on international students’ education and academic experiences in China. Through accounts obtained from international students of varied backgrounds, the paper also sheds light on nuances of internationalization, medium of instruction, and academic mobilities.

Conceptualizing EMI-cum-acceleration policy in a transnational HE market as the regulation and institutionalization of language practices through a chronometrical approach to time for the sake of global economic competition and social mobility, this qualitative case study explores the experiences and enactments of such a policy by six engineering students at Manar University (a pseudonym) in Saudi Arabia. The data were gathered from analysis of policy documents, individual interviews, and a group interview. The findings reveal that the ways in which each student negotiates, resists, and desires such a policy suggest that an individual has some temporal resources and autonomy to make sense of “the acceleration experience” within the broader “structural forces of acceleration” (Vostal, 2016, p. 117) created at the university. It was also found that students are positioned in a double-bind-between the capitalist logic of accumulation and competition (speed), and the democratic value of equity in the EMI program.

Transnational higher education (TNHE), often based on export models of Western-based universities and driven by neoliberal market economy agendas, has spread across the globe. One example of TNHE is Qatar’s Education City where six prestigious American international branch campuses (IBCs) all administer their degrees through English medium instruction (EMI). While there is a burgeoning amount of research investigating and problematizing issues in EMI higher education institutions, IBCs are a unique EMI setting due to their heavy reliance on importing faculty, staff, curricula and practices from their home campuses. Thus, this study takes an ethnographic case study approach to examine the language planning and policy and linguistic landscape at one IBC in Qatar. Drawing on multiple sources of data, the study reveals both the overt and covert language policies and ideologies of the institution and its various stakeholders, and the extent to which languages other than English are used and accepted.

Questions asked as part of phenomenographic research are used to critically synthesize findings from the case studies in this issue of English-medium instruction (EMI) in transnational higher education (TNHE). With respect to whether EMI in TNHE can be considered a phenomenon, it is suggested that the phenomenon is more discursive than empirical. Student and instructor perceptions of the phenomenon reveal a critical awareness of the policies that structure the learning environment and agency that takes advantage of the policies’ discursive nature to create alternative, multilingual language practices and improve learning. A gap between policy and practice that allows for negotiation of the E’s in EMI and TNHE, English and education, is hence called for.