The move towards EMI in higher education has been connected to university internationalisation, which reflects neoliberal trends. Research has underscored the need to consider socio-economic factors, materialities and ideologies surrounding EMI. Our study taps into this line of inquiry by focusing on how Swedish universities promote EMI programmes in business and economics in four videos. We take a novel approach to examine discursively constructed ideologies surrounding EMI by conducting a critical multimodal analysis of the videos. The analysis reveals how the use and representations of English – combined with different symbols, artefacts and concepts – are used to position these EMI programmes as both global and local. References to international rankings and multinational business partnerships position them on the global education market. At the same time, the programmes are locally situated in the academic tradition and entrepreneurial context of Sweden. Images of nature, the fika, or Scandinavian design present them in a way similar to tourist destinations. Tokens of economic and cultural eliteness create an extra layer of distinction, contributing to the added ‘elite’ value of EMI, where English is both taken for granted and serves a gate-keeping function. Findings provide insight into how EMI is promoted to international students.

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.

Communicative repertoires are assemblages and dynamic interplays of personal, community, and spatial resources that participants draw upon to construct meaning in multilingual universities. Despite growing recognition of the multilingual and multimodal resources possessed and used by university participants, existing research leaves little attention to the complexities and multiple dimensions of communicative repertoires. This special issue aims to address these gaps by investigating the repertoires required and used by students, teachers, and staff for their daily educational, research, and professional communication in multilingual and international university contexts. Comprising eight contributions, this special issue investigates how linguistic, semiotic and non-human resources are strategically mobilised, how different repertoires intersect in meaning-making and knowledge construction processes, and how they interact with institutional policies, ideologies and power relations. Together, these studies advance three critical agendas: understanding communicative repertoires as multi-scalar phenomena, foregrounding materialised and affective repertoire assemblages, and examining how repertoires reproduce, negotiate or contest linguistic and epistemic injustice. Looking ahead, this editorial introduction proposes repertoire assemblage as a productive theoretical lens and calls for inter-scalar approaches to communication in internationalised higher education.

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.

Research into digital research genres is relatively new, and the speed of technological development poses continuous challenges to researchers. This chapter engages with a growing body of EAP research on digital research genres, starting with questions concerning their conceptualization in the literature and state of the art. Zooming in on the research blog as an example of a stabilized digital research genre, the chapter discusses its key features, including hybridity, dialogicity, and recontextualization. Next, the chapter outlines the research methods used to study digital research genres, and finally reviews several pedagogical applications. On the whole, digital research genres that emerged as a result of Web 2.0 are characterized by more explicit writer-reader interaction, fewer editing filters, and an increased degree of dialogicity. At the same time, we are currently witnessing a shift towards more uniform and standardized language use resulting from the emergence of large language models, such as ChatGPT.

Gender has often been overlooked in tertiary English medium instruction (EMI) research. To address this gap, the present study investigates whether gender plays a role in EMI lecture comprehension challenges. The study included 37 participants (21 female and 16 male) who attended EMI lectures in a variety of subjects. Participants used a foot pedal to “time-stamp” comprehension challenges in real time during lectures. After the lectures, students joined stimulated recall interviews guided by the time stamps, where they re-watched time-stamped portions of lecture videos and explained reasons for non-comprehension. Results showed that gender did not play a statistically significant role in relation to a majority of the comprehension challenges, with the exception of top-down >> content-related, where females were more likely to report issues such as lack of prior content knowledge than males. Based on the findings, commentary about the role of gender in EMI and in relation to various language skills is provided.

The chapter explores students’ reported experiences of international peer collaboration during the preparation of their graded assignments as part of their English-medium university programme. Peer collaboration in the form of group work is a common learner activity in Nordic universities, especially in the context of programmes in business studies. Compared to other social sciences, business studies are particularly likely to offer English-medium programmes already at the bachelor level. The chapter thus investigates undergraduate students’ perspectives on group work as part of developing disciplinary literacy, with a focus on language quality, students’ agency, and problem-solving strategies. The findings highlight students’ uncertainties regarding acceptable (language) standards for the written assignment, which is an outcome of their group work. It also shows that the students’ aim to reach consensus in groups with diverse linguacultural backgrounds is in sharp contrast with who has access to powerful roles in the group work. Students with advanced English language proficiency tend to occupy more powerful positions and act as language regulators for written assignments. The chapter thus opens up for discussions on accommodating different perspectives within group work in EME business studies settings.