Listening to and learning from a university lecture can be an arduous task, particularly when the lecture is given in a second/additional language, which is often the case in English medium instruction (EMI) contexts. Further, listening research has been limited by methodological constraints and has offered few real-time insights into the lecture listening experience. This paper introduces an innovative idiodynamic method for monitoring lecture comprehension with the help of a footpedal device set in an EMI political science lecture. The data set includes the lecture recording, footpedal readings, and stimulated recall interviews with four students (two males, two females; four different first languages). We examine 1) what comprehension challenges students report during the lecture; 2) how the reported challenges vary among the four students; and 3) whether a listening challenge reported at a given time by more than one student has the same reason. Reported reasons for non-comprehension were categorized based on a data-coding scheme including top-down, bottom-up, affective, multimodal and environmental factors. More than half of the reported instances were due to top-down factors, followed by multimodal factors. The findings highlight that each student has idiosyncratic ways of engaging with the lecture content.

The lecture is a staple of university education worldwide. In order to glean disciplinary-specific information from the lecturer, students need to accurately process the speech stream. However, doing so in a second language, as often happens during English medium instruction (EMI) can be an arduous task. One often overlooked but fundamental listening issue is related to bottom-up processing, or decoding, of incoming speech (Field, 2008; Rost, 2024), which involves recognizing phonemes and segmenting the speech stream into individual constituents (Anderson, 2015). The present study reports on the bottom-up challenges faced by EMI students at a university in Sweden and the residual comprehension problems they may lead to during EMI lectures. This study marks the first investigation into bottom-up processing challenges that has been situated within authentic EMI lectures, providing ecological validity often absent in other listening studies.

Twenty-seven students across seven EMI lectures participated in the study. Participants used a footpedal during in-person lectures in their respective subjects to time-stamps moments of non-comprehension while listening. Afterwards, stimulated recall interviews were conducted, where the footpedal time stamps were used to replay parts of the lecture videos. After rewatching video segments, participants explained their reason(s) for non-comprehension. A total of 99 bottom-up issues were revealed, 48 being phoneme perception issues along with 51 problems parsing the speech stream. These instances are exemplified and discussed in relation to lecturer speech, student explanations, and context within the lecture.

Despite an abundance of research on English medium instruction (EMI) in general, few studies have concentrated on how EMI is used to teach humanities subjects. Even fewer studies have monitored the development of, and hinderances to, disciplinary literacy in a moment-to-moment fashion in EMI lectures. To address this gap, the present study investigated student comprehension challenges in an EMI philosophy of science lecture, a discipline that values argumentation and dialogue in knowledge construction. The lecturer was interviewed about her perspectives on teaching philosophy in EMI, where she emphasized the language-heavy nature of the subject. Three students used a novel footpedal device to indicate points in the lecture that they struggled to understand. The device provided “time stamps” that were used to locate the challenging episodes in the lecture video recording. Students then joined stimulated recall interviews where they described the causes of their comprehension difficulties, and thus, impediments to disciplinary learning. Findings showed students experiencing top-down challenges related to the subject-specific content the most, followed by bottom-up, environmental, multimodal, and affective aspects. Pedagogic strategies based on the findings are then provided.

This study examines how laughter is used to manage interactional (in)competence during word search sequences in peer L2 English interactions. While research has highlighted the diverse roles of laughter in L1 interaction and L2 classroom discourse, little attention has been paid to its role in L2 peer talk, particularly in online environments. Drawing on 548 min of Zoom conversations among 16 university students in Sweden and Japan, this study employs conversation analysis (CA) to explore how laughter emerges in during word search sequences–moments where speakers display difficulty retrieving a lexical item. Analysis identifies four recurrent positions for laughter: post-candidate word, pre-candidate word, with candidate word, and post-word search marker. Findings show that laughter functions not merely as an affective marker, but as an interactional resource that can (a) display difficulty in lexical retrieval, (b) pre-emptively flag a candidate word as potentially problematic, and (c) invite interlocutor to join the word search. However, the effectiveness of laughter as an interactional resource depends on a shared context, explicit cues, and the affordances of online communication. In some cases, laughter failed to facilitate progressivity, leading to prolonged or abandoned searches. Beyond its interactional role, laughter also reveals tensions between speakers’ current linguistic repertoire and their awareness of the linguistic repertoire they need. The study argues that laughter reveals both interactional competence–through cooperative management of trouble–and interactional incompetence, through reliance on laughter and their interlocutor. The findings suggest the need to raise awareness of explicit word search markers to enhance communicative clarity.

Purpose: This scoping review investigates research on Military English (ME) language and teaching over the past three decades. Despite the growing need for English proficiency among military personnel due to increases in international joint operations [Niculescu, B.-O., G. Obilişteanu, and I. A. Dragomir. 2019. “Contribution of Foreign Languages to Building the Professional Career of the Land Forces Academy Cadets.” Land Forces Academy Review 24 (3): 213–219], ME as a field of study lacks comprehensive research. The features and patterns of ME and effective approaches towards ME language instruction remain insufficiently explored.

Methodology: The study employs a scoping review approach [Arksey, H., and L. O’Malley. 2005. “Scoping Studies: Towards a Methodological Framework.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 8 (1): 19–32] to map the current state of ME research, including language features, themes, and pedagogical approaches. The study initially identified 1778 articles across major databases. This initial data set was then examined and narrowed down to 34 articles based on the inclusion criteria.

Findings and Originality: The findings indicate a diverse range of research themes and learner background within ME education, including motivation, needs analysis, and the description of Military English itself. The research also highlights the distinct domain of ME and the necessity of efficient, relevant, and tailored language instruction to meet the practical ME needs of learners. It also points out the limited number of studies that adequately evaluate the effectiveness of various teaching approaches. The study emphasizes the importance of alignment among the various stakeholders and calls for more rigorous research in the field.

Developing strong listening skills in a second language (L2) can be challenging for a variety of reasons. Within the context of L2 use in higher education, accurate and timely processing of aural input can be crucial for academic success, particularly because vast amounts of disciplinary-specific content are delivered via academic lectures in the students' and/or teacher's L2. This brief report introduces and shares early observations from the ReMoDEL project (Real Time Monitoring of Dynamic English Listening), which focuses on student listening comprehension in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) courses set within a multicultural, multilingual context, namely, Sweden. Employing a novel footpedal device to register moments of comprehension and noncomprehension, ReMoDEL identifies instances within EMI lectures when students report challenges in understanding and investigates the cause(s) of those challenges with the overall aims of identifying the myriad influences on comprehension of lecture content, cataloging student recovery strategies, and working to raise teacher awareness of the volatile and individualized nature of listening in EMI. The combination of footpedal data and stimulated recall interviews yielded 89 coded instances of noncomprehension (including multiple coding, when appropriate) that arose during a pilot study, of which a majority related to top-down aspects of listening (53), followed by affective, multimodal and environmental factors (10 each). Bottom-up processing issues were sparsely reported (four), and two mistaken pushes occurred. This brief report describes the project as well as quantitative and qualitative data from the pilot study.