EMI, EAP, and pedagogy: An autoethnographic account of a case study at a university in Japan

ABSTRACT

Kanazawa University, a national university in Japan, offers an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) program to its first-year students as a required subject of general education. It is an English-medium instruction (EMI) program with an English-only policy. In this article, I utilize autoethnography as a method to examine this EMI EAP program based on my experiences as a teacher while contextualizing my personal accounts in the extant studies of EAP, EMI, and English language teaching. The article reveals that West-centric coloniality and the native-speakerist myth are operating behind the program as the guiding language ideologies in ways to curtail non-native English-speaking teachers’ and students’ multilingual capacity. The article ends by suggesting potential changes the program may be able to incorporate to decolonize its current problematic pedagogical practices and to transform the program into a space where equitable linguistic sensibility is pursued and nurtured.

KEYWORDS:

• eigoka
• English for Academic Purposes
• English-medium instruction
• West-centric
• coloniality
• decolonization

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Jayson Parba for helpful comments on previous drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.