ABSTRACT
When viewed through a multimodal sociocultural lens, the university lecture is an intricate interaction in which the teacher and students are agentive in constructing the space for learning. Nonetheless, where English is the lingua franca of instruction, stakeholders have raised concerns regarding the effectiveness of this educational experience. Furthermore, the EMI context can present a unique but complex epistemic situation if students, and not teachers, have higher general English language proficiency (linguistic K+). Hence, this chapter aims to demonstrate the contribution of a qualitative, multimodal conversation analysis approach combined with membership categorisation analysis to examine when and how linguistically K+/content K- students visibly take agentive action in response to the input of a linguistically K-/content K+ teacher, and consequently how epistemic progression is mutually achieved. The data were collected from a second-year English-track Dentistry class on dental materials at a private Catalan university in Barcelona, Spain. The findings in this study show that, although the student/teacher roles momentarily blur in the co-construction of subject matter knowledge, the mobilisation of multimodal resources ultimately maintains their institutional categories stable. The study concludes with reflections on the need for social interaction studies in EMI, and implications for EMI practitioners, researchers and teacher educators.
