Navigating the instructional settings of EMI: a spatial perspective on university teachers’ experiences

ABSTRACT

While English as a medium of instruction (EMI) is becoming a global phenomenon across higher education contexts, little attention has been paid to the instructional experiences of EMI teachers. Informed by a spatial perspective, this study explored how a cohort of Chinese university teachers navigated their EMI instructional settings. Different from the conventional discourse that depicts EMI teachers as deficit due to their being nonnative speakers of English, this study shows that the teachers were able to capitalise on their spatial repertoires for alternative ways of meaning making in their EMI classrooms. Instead of reducing EMI into an English-only space, the findings show that the teachers constructed EMI as three major spaces, including a space for drawing upon local experiences as spatial resources, a space for redefining internationalisation, and a space for translingual pedagogy practice. Through the construction of these spaces, the teachers reclaimed their legitimacy of being EMI teachers. The findings lend further support to refute the monolingual bias in EMI practice and call for attention to how EMI teachers can act as agents in reconstructing EMI instructional settings as spaces for multilingual and multimodal meaning making.

KEYWORDS:

• EMI
• glocalization
• internationalisation
• higher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by General Research Fund of the Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China: [Grant Number 14620117].

Notes on contributors

Mingyue Michelle Gu

Mingyue Michelle Gu is an Associate Professor at the Department of English language Education, the Faculty of Humanities, the Education University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include internationalization in higher education, language policy and planning, multilingualism and mobility, and discourse theory and analysis. She received the Research Excellence Award in 2017 and Young Researcher Award in 2015 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Zhen Jennie Li

Zhen Jennie Li is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chinese Language Studies, the Education University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include teaching Chinese as a foreign language, heritage language education, teacher development, and identity in multilingual contexts.

Lianjiang Jiang

Lianjiang Jiang is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English Language Education, The Education University of Hong Kong. His research interests include digital multimodal composing and new literacy studies. His publications have appeared in journals such as TESOL Quarterly, Journal of Second Language Writing, and Computer Assisted Language Learning.