First, I want to say that I’m a bit of an LPP nerd. (That’s language policy and planning to you non-nerds out there). My doctoral research was on LPP, and the Canadian Multidisciplinary Approaches to Language Policy and Planning conference is one of my favourites to attend and present at.

So I can’t help but look at a lot of my other professional work through an LPP lens.

I’m developing some English-Medium Instruction training for university lecturers these days, and so I’m spending a lot of time seeking out and reviewing teaching competency frameworks for EMI and CLIL.

There’s a lot to say about these frameworks and what they do and don’t include—in other words, what place language proficiency, pedagogical skills, intercultural competency, and other skills have in what we think makes good teaching in EMI or CLIL contexts. (Further blog post(s) to come on this topic!).

But right now I’m thinking about the importance of sociopolitical context in EMI, be it the context of one’s institution, the national political/higher education context, or the global context. Specifically, I’m interested in how the policies at play locally, nationally, and globally interplay with English-medium higher education.

National or institutional policies can dictate the language(s) of teaching, research and even administrative work in HE, and can therefore center or marginalize English or local language(s), with a host of consequences for lecturers and their students. Academic literature abounds on national and global language policy issues related to EMI, but this 2019 article, The Dilemma of English-Medium Instruction in Higher Education by Philip Altbach and Hans de Wit, gives a global overview, with a brief case study of the Netherlands.

Local policy context matters as well. Over the years of leading EMI lecturer training with Dalhousie University, I’ve seen something occur again and again. After weeks developing lecturers’ pedagogical skills for their own courses and classrooms, in the last few sessions, someone inevitably asks “What about implementation?” They’re worried about how their institution’s policies influence curriculum and assessments, budgets, resourcing, staffing, PD opportunities and therefore how they’re able to roll out EMI in their classes.

If we see EMI content lecturers as “street-level bureaucrats” (De Soete & Slembrouck, 2025), then critical awareness of the issues surrounding EMI policies locally, nationally, and globally, as well as strategies to navigate them, become key competencies for anyone engaged in teaching in EMI.

This is part of the competency of, “EMI Awareness”, as Deroey (2023) and Sun (2023) call it in their surveys of EMI lecturer training programmes and certification.

The CLIL Teacher’s Competencies Grid (Bertaux et al., 2010) seems to have been developed for primary/secondary school settings rather than higher ed but can be nonetheless informative with regards to lecturer training.

The Grid organizes competencies into two categories: Underpinning CLIL and Setting CLIL in Motion. Competencies related to policy can be found in two areas of competence: Programme Parameters and CLIL Policy. Below are some of the competencies and indicators related to policy.

Programme Parameters:

• Adopting an approach to CLIL
  • Can describe national and/or regional policies concerning CLIL

CLIL Policy:

• Adapting CLIL to the local context
  • Can contextualise CLIL teaching with regard to the school curriculum
  • Can link programme parameters and the needs of a particular class of students
  • Can identify and engage with CLIL stakeholders, and help stakeholders (students, parents, inspectors, non-CLIL teachers, etc.) manage expectations with regard to language and content learning targets
• Integrating CLIL into the curriculum
  • Can describe how CLIL links to the national or regional curriculum
  • Can deliver CLIL according to requirements of educational authorities
• Linking the CLIL programme with school ethos
  • Can articulate how CLIL could be reflected in a school’s vision and mission statements, and in planning and public relations documents
  • Can foster the integration of the CLIL programme into school life (e.g., resource choices, action research, assemblies or other school events)
  • Can represent the interests of the CLIL programme and of the students when participating in school meetings, and other forms of professional dialogue
• Articulating quality assurance measures for CLIL
  • Can design and apply evaluation and assessment tools (tests, stakeholder surveys, portfolios, rubrics, etc.)
  • Can interpret data from evaluations, and take related measures for programme improvement

I’ll be reflecting on how to draw from and/or adapt this competency framework for the EMI lecturer training I’m currently developing.

References:

Bertaux, P., Coonan, C.M., Frigols-Martín, M.J., Mehisto, P. (2010). CLIL Teacher’s Competency Grid. CLIL Cascade Network (CCN). http://tplusm.net/CLIL_Competences_Grid_31.12.09.pdf

Deroey, K. L. B. (2023). English medium instruction lecturer training programmes: Content, delivery, ways forward. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 62, 101223. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2023.101223

De Soete, A., & Slembrouck, S. (2025). The EMI content lecturer as a street-level bureaucrat: Discretionary actions and coping mechanisms in micro-level language policy-as-produced. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 46(4), 1176–1195. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2023.2229801

Sun Y (2023) The professionalization of English medium instruction lecturer: content and certification. Frontiers in Education. 8:1191267. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1191267