ABSTRACT
Analyses of contexts where English is used to teach an academic subject in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have, for some researchers, remained at the level of discussions over nomenclature and definition: Should we be calling this academic phenomenon EMI, EME, or ETP? Should the original 2015 definition of English-medium instruction (EMI) be modified (Dearden, 2015)? While such discussions among linguists help advance our conceptualisation of EMI, concentrating on such issues places EMI and its implications in a theoretical context and shifts the focus from how teachers of all subjects are coping with EMI teaching and learning. In addition to considering the theoretical conceptualisations of EMI, we need to address the day-to-day reality of university lecturers faced with the daunting challenge of teaching their academic subjects, such as Engineering, Business or Science, through a ‘foreign’ language to a lecture hall of home and international students, where English is often a ‘foreign’ language for both the lecturer and many of the students. This chapter outlines some key characteristics of teaching at HEIs and suggest why lecturers working in EMI contexts require a further level of pedagogical knowledge and understanding above and beyond other HEI teaching contexts. We then use this basis, combined with our practical experience of training EMI lecturers in universities around the world, to offer some ‘tips’ that can help lecturers teaching in an EMI context. Finally, we will recommend ways of supporting lecturers with their ongoing EMI professional development. While many of the suggestions we give in this chapter may not be new, they are often missing from EMI professional development courses. The contents of this chapter are taken from our work with higher education (HE) practitioners around the world and our work developing the MAST (Management, Admissions, Student outcomes, Teaching and learning) framework for EMI (Dearden & Spain, 2017). These suggestions have been demonstrated to be effective at the EMI universities with which we have worked.
