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- Volume 2, Issue 2, 2023
Journal of English-Medium Instruction - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2023
Volume 2, Issue 2, 2023
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Positional identities negotiated within a collective identity
Author(s): Miki Shibatapp.: 109–133 (25)More LessAbstractThis qualitative study explores Japanese students’ positional identities in EMI contexts. Their positioning act is operated by the sociocultural norms of a program shared among community members. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with a total of 13 first-year students enrolled in an undergraduate English-taught program (ETP) at a Japanese national university. A thematic analysis of the interview data produced four main themes: (a) acting self-identification as a peripheral position, (b) hierarchy in a Japanese cohort, (c) an identity gap between the ideal self and reality, and (d) the ETP-A collective identity for membership negotiation. The study shows how participants position themselves and others based on English proficiency and academic culture, whereby students force themselves to acculturate for legitimate full participation. Such traits reflect collective identities and function as forms of sociocultural norms that determine legitimate membership. Furthermore, such norms lead to stratification between students: Japanese students identify themselves as inactive members of the ETP group with limited second-language (L2) English. Conversely, the collective identity helps them reclaim their ETP membership in Japanese-medium instruction classes with Japanese students from outside of the ETP. Japanese students’ positional identities are discussed in terms of L2 English competence and classroom culture.
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EMI and its sociolinguistic entanglement with local languages
Author(s): Alexander De Soetepp.: 134–158 (25)More LessAbstractAgainst the backdrop of inter-institutional competition and transnational ambitions, the prevalence of English-medium instruction (EMI) programs in higher education and their relative distribution across various national, regional, and institutional contexts is rapidly growing. When studying the increasingly globalized phenomenon of EMI, there is a tendency to adopt macro-pedagogical perspectives, with comparatively little attention being devoted to disciplinary differences which may warrant intra-institutional differentiation through situationally adaptable approaches to EMI policy and implementation strategies. The present study attempts to further enhance and nuance our understanding of the influence of disciplinary knowledge structures and literacies on lecturers’ and students’ linguistic needs in EMI courses. This article reports on linguistic ethnographic fieldwork at a Belgian higher education institution in which graduate students in international bio-science engineering and industrial design engineering programs were observed during the 2021–2022 academic year. Differences in disciplinary knowledge structures and literacies are explored through means of survey, interview, and classroom observation data. Results corroborate earlier findings on the interplay between disciplinary knowledge structures and attitudes towards EMI. Additionally, the data illustrate how the active inclusion of local languages alongside English can be considered disciplinarily relevant in certain programs.
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“I don’t care about the physical appearance in a job”
Author(s): Xavier Martin-Rubió and Irati Diert-Botépp.: 159–182 (24)More LessAbstractEnglish-medium instruction (EMI) settings can be particularly challenging for lecturers since they must teach disciplinary content through a foreign language. This paper centers on an episode that reflects the demanding nature of EMI classrooms: a student objects to a part of the task instructions provided by the lecturer. Therefore, the objective of this study is first, to investigate the strategies used by an EMI lecturer in managing a challenging episode; and second, to identify the contextual factors that potentially impacted the lecturer’s pedagogical and interactional decisions in this situation. The episode is analyzed using multimodal analysis (Norris, 2004) and ethnographic knowledge from an interview with the lecturer. Findings reveal some degree of struggle in managing the situation adeptly, and suggest that unclearly delivered instructions, a resistance to delving into the underlying reason behind the conflict, an English-only policy, and a degree of language insecurity (and perhaps even lack of proficiency) appear to have played a relevant role in how the episode unfolded and was approached by the lecturer.
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Motivation and investment
Author(s): Elizabeth Machin, Jennifer Ament and Carmen Pérez-Vidal
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