ABSTRACT
Within an existing EMI (English-medium instruction) undergraduate program in Tokyo, two new student-mobility programs were added: AIMS (ASEAN International Mobility for Students Program) in 2013 and APM (Area Studies and Plurilingual-Multicultural Education Program) in 2017, both of which were funded for five years by the MEXT (the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology). The EMI program collaborates with six universities in ASEAN for AIMS, and with French, Spanish, Chinese, and Korean partner institutions for APM. Although the 18-year-old EMI program is often associated with “English-Only” as its medium of instruction policy, the program participants have been truly multilingual/multicultural from the beginning, where the first language of the majority of students and teachers is not English, representing a typical ELF (English as a lingua franca) situation. The recent policy implementations were designed to fully mobilize the diverse linguistic and cultural resources that the participants bring in and foreground multilingual and multicultural aspects of education. The chapter, based on the eight-year-long project on EMI and ELF in Japanese higher education, discusses how such multilingual-oriented policy is viewed and challenged by the stakeholders.
