I love working with faculty and teachers to help them develop as educators in English-Medium Instruction environments. Delivering EMI training, whether in the context of the Dalhousie University Certificate in English-Medium Instruction or as founding director of an independent consultancy, always involves deep discussions and reflection about language, teaching, and learning–three of my favourite things. 🙂

To be a good EMI trainer, one should have a good combination of academic qualifications and teaching/training experience, have deep knowledge of all the theoretical concepts involved, and gain familiarity with the latest scholarship around EMI pedagogies and policies, and practice.

But in addition to all that, there have been a few experiences that have helped me become a better EMI trainer.

1. Delivering keynotes, talks and courses in my additional languages.
   My L1 is Canadian English. I studied French in school and French and Spanish in university. I achieved fluency in my twenties in both languages through a combination of formal and independent study, and living and working in immersion environments in Quebec, Latin America, and Europe.
   
   I’ve had the privilege of teaching and speaking in my additional languages, for example, giving the keynote address on internationalization of teaching and learning at the IDEA Seminario Innovación Docente at UDD in Santiago, addressing the Alianza del Pacfico Red del Inglés about language education, or teaching the Spanish-language version of the Leadership of Internationalization of the Curriculum Initiatives course at Dalhousie University. In most of these cases, the audiences were made up of primarily L1 speakers.
   
   This has helped put me in the shoes of an EMI content lecturer who is an expert user of English, though it’s not their L1. I’ve experienced first-hand the extra time involved in preparing and spell-checking notes, slides, and materials; building and bolstering my disciplinary vocabulary, and the nerves about fluency, mis-speaking, or misunderstanding audience questions. And when I recommend strategies to overcome these challenges to an EMI trainee, most of the time, it’s something I’ve tested out first hand.
   

2. Delivering bilingual talks. It’s not uncommon at national conferences in Canada for English/French bilingual sessions to be encouraged. For example, at the Canadian Association for Language Assessment/Association canadienne pour l’évaluation des langues conference recently held in Halifax, presenters were given the option of presenting in English or French only, speaking in English with French slides, speaking in French with English slides, or doing a bilingual presentation. I chose to deliver my talk on the AI Assessment Scale in both official languages, to an audience consisting of a good number of people who could understand both English and French alongside some monolingual English speakers.

Through experiences like this, I’ve developed insight into the whens, whys, and hows of delivering a session in more than one language, i.e. translanguaging. EMI lecturers often draw not only on English, but also on the other language(s) in their students’ repertoires in order to communicate. There are a host of factors to navigate when teaching in more than one language, from the learners’ levels of comprehension, to how to best activate prior knowledge, to political factors and issues of representation and equity. It’s a lot! Navigating this myself has allowed me to identify some of the valuable skills needed.

3. Being an EMI content lecturer in China. There are multiple definitions of exactly constitutes an EMI teaching context. Dearden (2015) defines EMI as “[t]he use of the English language to teach academic subjects in countries or jurisdictions where the first language (L1) of the majority of the population is not English”.

China meets this definition of an EMI context. Last fall I taught Cross-Cultural Communication through the medium of English at Shandong University of Finance and Economics in Jinan, China. This was not a language course, but a content course in intercultural communication for pre-service teachers of Chinese.

I experienced all aspects of the EMI lecturer experience with a group of students studying content through the medium of English for the first time: Course design and lesson planning trying to incorporate the 4Cs of content and language integrated learning (CLIL); experimenting with a variety of active pedagogies and instructional techniques; deciding the role of translanguaging in the course, given my limited proficiency in Chinese; dealing with a range of levels of English language proficiency; navigating the complexities of formative and summative assessments.

Oh, and did I mention I only found out a few weeks before the semester start that I’d be teaching this course? Hasty, top-down implementation of EMI is unfortunately not uncommon, so this too helped me gain even more empathy for the trainees I work with.

4. Being an EMI content lecturer in Canada. Dearden’s definition of EMI excludes Anglophone contexts; however, others don’t. Akıncıoğlu (2023, p. 4) defines EMI as “the use of English—whether through sole use, partial use, code-switching, or other forms—by both students and content teachers to teach and learn academic subjects (other than English itself) within university settings, regardless of their locale.”

By the definition, my several semesters’ work on a Master’s program in education as a lecturer at Saint Mary’s University—a highly linguistically- and culturally-diverse university setting in Canada—was also EMI. This was very different than my experience in China. For example, given the high levels of English language proficiency and mixed language backgrounds of the class, translanguaging played much less of a role, and disciplinary language and literacy development took the forefront.

EMI is never neutral; there are a host of sociopolitical issues surrounding its policies, pedagogies, and practices, no matter the context. In my teaching at Saint Mary’s, we could also tackle the sociopolitical issues surrounding EMI, as it aligned with the subject matter of the course and also the more advanced level of proficiency and critical engagement of the students. This drove home for me the importance of developing a criticality and a critical approach to practice alongside the the host of other EMI lecturer skills and competencies in any EMI training program.

References

Akıncıoğlu, M. (2024). Rethinking of EMI in higher education: a critical view on its scope, definition and quality. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 37(2), 139-154.

Dearden, J. (2015). English as a medium of instruction – a growing global phenomenon. British Council. https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/publications/case-studies-insights-and-research/english-medium-instruction-growing-global