Abstract:

While most of the literature on English medium instruction (EMI) in higher education is written by scholars of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and comparative philology, there are fewer EMI studies conducted by the content lecturers themselves. Also, there are few studies that probed the quality of interaction and learner engagement in highly interactive content learning environments using English.

The aim of this study is two-fold:
(1) to investigate how a content lecturer designs, applies, and re-adjusts interactive pedagogy to match students’ linguistic, cognitive, socio-cultural, and affective needs,
(2) to qualitatively assess the effect of these interventions on student outcomes.

The participants were undergraduate students from several universities in Japan. The study applied classroom ethnography and discourse analytic research methods to examine participants’ behavior, interaction, class activities, and discourses in the formal and semi-formal settings during and after the course. Findings suggest that students faced challenges like those explored in previous studies. However, a closer investigation of how this process transformed once the content lecturer applied various interactive pedagogical strategies sheds light on a few previously unexplored factors that help understand quality interaction in an EMI setting. The paper discusses the empirical and theoretical implications of the findings.

Keywords:

English Medium Instruction, EMI, Interaction, Non-Native, Lecturers, Higher Education.