EMI Lecturer Professional Development: Good Practices & Successful Models

Navigating EME Challenges: Professional Development through ROAD-MAPPING

Dr. Emma Dafouz and Rhona Lohan

The global expansion of English-medium education (EME) has transformed the way lecturers and students currently engage in teaching and learning practices. This significant shift has also created an unparalleled need for teacher professional development (TPD) programs for EME. Initially, these TPD programs focused on enhancing content experts’ English proficiency but overlooked other crucial aspects necessary for effective EME, such as understanding disciplinary literacies, taking into account students' and lecturers’ first language (L1) or the international stance of EME.

Against this backdrop, this talk will be divided into two parts. In the first part, we will briefly introduce the ROAD-MAPPING framework (Dafouz & Smit, 2016, 2020, 2023) as a conceptual and analytical model that provides a clear, situated analysis of the contextual factors essential for effective EME. In the second part, we will apply the ROAD-MAPPING framework to a case study of a private business university in Spain (Lohan & Dafouz, 2024) where English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses have been designed to support all students, both those in the Spanish-medium strand and those in the EME strand. The talk will end with examples of which strategies and factors have been instrumental in the “peaceful coexistence” of EAP and EME courses.

Rhona and Emma have recently published an article in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes on this study: A situated analysis of English-medium education in a private business university: Insights from the ROAD-MAPPING framework.

Emma Dafouz is a Full Professor in the Department of English Studies at Complutense University of Madrid. Since the 2000s her research has dealt with understanding the roles of language in education, both in Bilingual/CLIL programs and in English-medium higher education. She served as Advisor for Curricular Internationalization at her university from 2014-19 and developed the Plan for Internationalization. She has published extensively on English-medium education. Her most recent books are ROAD-MAPPING English-medium education in the Internationalised University, co-authored with Ute Smit (Palgrave) and the edition of Researching English-medium education (Routledge). Dr Dafouz was the Principal Investigator of the international project known as SHIFT (2020-2024), funded by the Spanish Government, which examines student and lecturer understanding and use of disciplinary literacies in English-taught business programs.

Rhona Patricia Lohan is a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics at Complutense University of Madrid. She is also a lecturer in EAP and Scientific Research at ESIC University, Madrid. Her research interests include English-medium education in multilingual university settings, Academic writing, and sociolinguistics. Currently, she is involved in a longitudinal comparative study exploring the impact of EME on English proficiency. A recent publication includes A situated analysis of English-medium education in a private business university: Insights from the ROAD-MAPPING framework in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes, co-authored with Dr. Emma Dafouz.

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Creating positive pedagogical change in EMI: Impact from an innovative faculty professional development initiative in Taiwan

Dr. Meredith Doran and Dr. Jacob Reiker

While the rapid growth of English-medium instruction (EMI) has been driven by top-down policy initiatives that aim to internationalize higher education, the educational value of EMI ultimately depends on the instructional practices and decision-making of faculty in their classrooms. As such, the successful implementation of EMI requires understanding and addressing the disciplinary, linguistic, pedagogical, and institutional challenges that faculty face at the level of everyday classroom practice (Lasagabaster, 2022; Sánchez-Pérez, 2020). These challenges have been consistently and repeatedly foregrounded as variable student proficiency (e.g., Arnó-Macià & Mancho-Barés, 2015), negative stakeholder perceptions (e.g., Shao & Wilkinson, 2023), and ambiguous policy implementation (e.g., Macaro & Han, 2020). Yet, far less has been written about how faculty can best be supported in creating the positive momentum that would begin to address and possibly overcome these challenges in the context of their teaching, and what role faculty development initiatives might play in catalyzing these changes.

In this presentation, we address these two issues by presenting a model of EMI professional development that is designed to support faculty in creating change in their instructional practices, the impact of which we illustrate by means of an in-depth case study of a faculty member’s development at a technical university in Taiwan. We demonstrate how the content, quality, and types of instructional support provided to the EMI faculty member enabled him to innovate in his teaching practices, with palpable positive impacts on a focal instructional goal: increased student engagement and electrical engineering content learning in and through English. On the basis of this analysis, we advocate for the value of a model of EMI faculty support that locates development — the process of creating meaningful changes in teacher practices and reasoning — at its core. At a broader level, we hope to make the case that drawing connections between EMI faculty professional development program design, implementation, and impact provides a much-needed pathway for developing shared understandings of effective practices, and for achieving the goal of improving the teaching and learning experiences of faculty and students in EMI courses worldwide.

Meredith and Jacob has kindly provided the resources from their talk in PDF format through this link, including slides and references.  They invite you to engage with these resources in any way you wish and they hope to have the opportunity to continue the conversation on EMI faculty development research and practice.

Dr. Meredith Doran is an Associate Teaching Professor of Applied Linguistics at The Pennsylvania State University, USA. She has extensive experience as a second language educator, program administrator, and sociolinguist. Her research interests include faculty development in English-Medium Instruction, language teacher education, English for Specific Purposes, and inclusive communication in multilingual settings. Her scholarly publications have appeared in venues including The Modern Language Journal, Teaching and Teacher Education, and Contemporary French & Francophone Studies as well as in several edited books.
Faculty Profile

Dr. Jacob Rieker is an Assistant Research Professor and Researcher in English for Specific Purposes and English as a Medium of Instruction in the Department of Applied Linguistics at The Pennsylvania State University, USA. His research engages Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory primarily in the contexts of English-Medium Instruction and second language teacher education to both document and promote faculty and teacher development. His publications have appeared in venues including Second Language Teacher Education, TESL-EJ, and Advances in Health Sciences Education. He is co-editor, with Karen Johnson and Paula Golombek, of a recently released book, Transformative L2 Teacher Education Innovations: Insights from Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory (Routledge).
Faculty Profile