Development of EMI teacher language awareness: does team teaching help?

Abstract

Globalization and internationalization in higher education have promoted the worldwide popularity of English-medium instruction (EMI) programs. The successful implementation of EMI programs calls for content-language integration, which requires EMI teachers’ language awareness. Yet, empirical studies investigating EMI teachers’ language awareness still remains scarce. This study aimed to explore the development of language awareness through a Chinese EMI teacher’s 10-month team teaching with an English teacher. With data mainly gathered from semi-structured retrospective interviews and video-recorded classroom observation, the study found that the EMI teacher experienced noticeable changes in language awareness and pedagogical practice. This study also yielded some important implications for EMI teacher education.

Keywords:

• English-medium instruction
• teacher language awareness
• team teaching
• development
• dialectics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the national fund from Ministry of Education, China (grant number: 2021050084).