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.

As the number of English medium instruction (EMI) courses around the world continues to increase, so too does the number of teachers operating in EMI. Previous research on EMI teachers has investigated teacher identity construction, teacher development, perspectives on the role of language in teaching and learning, and classroom practices. However, much existing literature on EMI teachers tends to treat them as a homogeneous group and overlooks the heterogeneity that may offer additional and more nuanced insights into teachers working on the frontlines of EMI. To address this gap, the present study emphasizes the heterogeneity of EMI teachers by investigating two groups of teachers working in the Swedish EMI context: Swedish EMI teachers and expatriate EMI teachers in Sweden. Employing qualitative semi-structured interviews analyzed through deductive content analysis, it examines between-group variables such as whether teachers share a first language with students and the amount and location(s) of their EMI teaching experience. The interviews covered the following topics: teacher background and development; views on student group characteristics; and perspectives on student English proficiency. Comparisons between the Swedish teachers and the expatriate teachers in Sweden show several overlaps but also divergences, including the impact of having EMI experience from multiple contexts and the option of translanguaging.

English medium instruction (EMI) courses can present challenges for both lecturers and students. The lecturer’s planning and delivery of lecture content, especially in terms of spoken output, has rarely been investigated. This study focused on an analysis of two university lectures from different disciplines. In pre-lecture discussions with the researcher, lecturers had indicated a set of key concepts and important words that they expected the students to recognize and learn more about during the lectures. Based on those lists, the lecture transcripts were scrutinized in terms of keyword frequency as well as in relation to Sinclair and Coulthard’s (1975) framework for understanding classroom discourse and speaker output, which allowed patterns of keyword use within lecture discourse to be identified. Comparative results from the analysis showed keywords being more frequent in the Sociology lecture than in the Robotics class. In terms of patterns of lecturer output, the majority of keywords were included in the categories “Informative” and “Comment”; however, quantitative and proportional differences in these patterns were also observed. Practical advice for EMI lecturers in relation to keyword frequency and framing is offered to account for language proficiency levels of teachers and/or students in similar higher education contexts.

This chapter emphasizes the development of tenable, justifiable, and durable teaching skills for a sustainable Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) career through the inclusion of pedagogical reasoning and reflective practice in materials design. Set in Sweden, the chapter focuses on the fundamental concepts of pedagogical reasoning and reflective practice and links them to practical elements of teachers’ work, such as lesson planning and materials selection. Introducing a set of principles for TESOL education as a base, these principles are then exemplified via a set of pedagogical activities intended to prepare new teachers for classroom life, including the needs of teachers to challenge and extend the English abilities of learners while also accounting for the mixed ability groups they will encounter. The chapter also describes influential policy documents and their relation to essential practical skills needed by second language (L2) TESOL educators in Sweden with emphasis on the secondary school level. In doing so, the chapter acknowledges the integration of important aspects of learning teaching in materials creation, such as the development of teacher beliefs, incorporating one’s past experience as an L2 learner, applying abstract concepts to concrete instructional circumstances, and adapting to various teaching scenarios. The materials presented in the chapter illustrate how innovative and sustainable materials design can incorporate meaningful and authentic experiences in TESOL education, respond to a lack of concrete teaching practice in TESOL education in Sweden, and instil in student teachers a continuous drive to understand and thrive in their classrooms.

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.

The growth of and attention given to English-medium instruction (EMI) and related topics in contemporary higher education research was well-represented at the AILA 2024 World Congress in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Research reports and symposia from around the globe attest to the fact that EMI remains a consistent area of interest and that many questions and research agendas are being engaged in a number of ways and at a range of levels. This paper takes the opportunity offered by one of the AILA 2024 workshops, namely “Comparative guidelines for cross-contextual EMI research: Policies, people, and practices” (Siegel, Kumazawa & Zuaro, 2024), to reflect on some of the key interrogatives that still accompany EMI as an educational approach, regardless of its context of implementation. Set against the backdrop of multiple EMI sessions at the conference, the workshop is foregrounded as an example of successful cross-contextual EMI description, shedding light on the advantages of adopting similar analytical categories in — sometimes very — different contexts. This is done to showcase how structured comparison can facilitate the identification of areas of divergence. In the present paper, then, we argue in favor of clarity and efficiency in EMI contextual description and suggest avenues for future research that could benefit from cross-contextual studies. We do this by recounting our collaborative experiences and articulating when and in what ways aspects of the road-mapping framework (Dafouz & Smit, 2020), deployed in the workshop itself, emerged naturally since the beginning of our joint work.

Teachers and students around the world are engaged in teaching and learning subject content using English, as a second or additional language (L2), or as an instructional language. As more and more higher education institutions adopt English medium instruction (EMI), the need for systematic teacher education grows in tandem. The entry highlights the need for specialized teacher education for EMI and argues against faulty assumptions that EMI is the same as teaching in a first language (L1). EMI teachers and those who provide pedagogic support and teacher training for them would benefit from acknowledging the crucial impact that L2 English proficiency has on classroom teaching and learning. The language proficiency variable relates to both teachers and students. In addition to individual characteristics and broader language policies, L2 English proficiency and confidence levels influence a number of aspects of EMI, including pace, materials selection, expectations of students, and learning outcomes. To account for these factors and support teacher education for EMI, this entry describes a number of competences relevant for EMI instructors that can be fostered through both individual and systematic professional development.