Journal of English-Medium Instruction - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2025

The introductory paper to this special issue makes a call for interdisciplinarity in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) on the grounds that EMI can only be properly studied and its challenges addressed by understanding its entanglement with a wider political, economic and social restructuring of higher education. The paper first offers a taxonomy of interdisciplinarity, drawing a distinction between interdisciplinarity within and beyond applied linguistics, the former of which has been most common within EMI to date. Following a synopsis of each of the five contributions, we evaluate the extent to which the issue has achieved its objectives. While the special issue advocates strongly for interdisciplinarity, it also acknowledges the challenges of engaging in genuine interdisciplinary scholarship and points to the structures that work to uphold disciplinary boundaries. We conclude by offering some ways forward for interdisciplinarity in EMI, arguing particularly for interdisciplinarity that extends beyond applied linguistics.

Lipsky’s (1980) notion of street-level bureaucracy can be used as a novel approach to studying the multilingual practice dimensions of English-medium instruction (EMI) classroom interaction. Existing work has demonstrated how Lipsky’s framework allows us to carefully consider on-the-ground language policy construction by EMI content lecturers, painting a picture of the lecturer as a lens through which institutional language policy is reflected or — at times — refracted in situated classroom practice. This requires an interactional perspective sensitive to the management of frame and participant alignment. In this article, I investigate how negotiation of language policy is brought about interactionally in the EMI classroom. The dataset contains 23 classroom recordings which capture the interactions between six lecturers and their students in two EMI engineering programs at a Belgian university. The data are analyzed interactionally through a combination of Lipsky’s model and frame analysis. This interdisciplinary approach brings into focus the interactional dynamics and distribution of negotiation sequences. In this way, this article contributes to our understanding of the agentive role of the EMI content lecturer while simultaneously valorizing context-sensitive translanguaging in the globalized linguistic-educational practice of English-medium instruction.

English-medium instruction (EMI), and more broadly English-medium education (EME), is growing in leaps and bounds in multilingual university settings globally. Despite the phenomenon of EMI affecting all stakeholders in any given university, research concerning EMI pedagogical and sociolinguistic issues most often occupies the attention of applied linguists alone. This study aims to open up research on EMI to include interdisciplinary perspectives from faculty members in the disciplines of applied linguistics, education and media studies. The study takes the form of a collaborative autoethnography whereby the authors, as participants, reflect on their experiences and perceptions of EMI in their respective disciplines in the context of higher education in the United Arab Emirates. Findings revealed both similarities and differences between approaches and experiences of EMI across disciplines. Drawing on the findings, open sharing and discussion of EMI struggles and triumphs is recommended together with critical awareness of decolonisation in educationscapes and teacher agency in EMI classrooms.

English-medium instruction (EMI) continues to grow in prominence in higher education because of its various advantages for stakeholders regarding improved job prospects, access to current literature, and the internationalisation of universities. Home to a few of the very first EMI higher education institutions (HEIs) worldwide, Türkiye continues to follow this trend. However, despite numerous benefits of EMI in today’s globalised world, certain subject areas surprisingly lack any EMI programmes. Approximately 69.1% of all undergraduate programmes are taught in Turkish-medium instruction, while the majority of the remaining programmes are taught in English. This study aims to establish the reasons why Turkish remains the medium of instruction (MoI) in some subjects. The investigation was conducted using an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates (1) the human capital theory of socioeconomics and (2) the linguistic protectionism of sociolinguistics. In semi-structured interviews, administrative stakeholders indicated that one reason for the lack of interest in pursuing an EMI programme in their subjects is low demand for EMI graduates in particular sectors. The paper also discusses the implications of adopting theories from other fields for EMI. Hence, linguistic protectionism, which accounts for an ideological and political wish to protect Turkish as MoI in this study, was also investigated.

This linguistic ethnography investigates perspectives on effective English communication of nine English-medium graduates employed in a multicultural high-risk industry. Our collaboration as two nuclear professionals uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine workplace communication at a joint venture involving Emirati and Korean partners in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) where English is seen as both a problem and a solution. The study draws on etic inputs from English-medium education (EME) discourses linking English to employability and lingua franca communication, a concern with miscommunication in organizational studies, and workplace sociolinguistics for conceptual tools highlighting transactional goals within workplace communication. This study uses ethnographic interviews to generate understandings of the safety basis of workplace communication in English in a multicultural high-risk industry. The study provides practical insights for language educators on effective communication in a high-stakes sector where safety is a topic of talk and safety informs the development of a professional variety of nuclear English and associated communication techniques. The study highlights safe communication practices as a feature of workplace communication in English, provides some guidance on relevant resources from aviation English, and emphasizes the need for further collaborations between academia and industry.

While English-medium instruction (EMI) is growing rapidly as a field of practice, there is a lack of agreement around its conceptual and terminological boundaries, and its purposes are often ill defined. To deal with the complexity of the phenomena it addresses, it has been argued that EMI should adopt an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary perspective. This conceptual article adopts a different position, arguing that EMI is best seen as an example of a “practical assemblage” (Pennycook, 2024), which draws on different epistemic resources to engage with its own set of problems, rather than vying to become a discipline in itself. Using the sociological lens of Legitimation Code Theory (Maton, 2014), the article proposes a framework for positioning EMI as an autonomous field of inquiry, addressing its own problem-situations and research questions. The analysis finds that, rather than building boundaries around itself, EMI as a practical assemblage would be better placed to open itself to ideas from other domains of enquiry while maintaining its autonomy in working on its own problems for its own purposes.