ABSTRACT
English as a lingua franca is a crucial enabling factor in much of contemporary international mobility, and certainly in almost all academic contexts; universities nevertheless also tend to offer opportunities for learning local languages to exchange and degree students and to staff members hired from abroad. The use of English as the language through which academic content is taught anywhere in the world is typically labelled “English-medium instruction”, or EMI for short. However, neither the term nor the concept itself is uncontested. One problem is that EMI is hard to define in a global sense because its use varies so much according to local context. Shohamy draws on Spolsky’s original tripartite language policy framework to produce an expanded conceptualisation of language policy that links it more overtly to language ideology by means of introducing what she calls “mechanisms”.
