On the need for cross-contextual EMI research: Reports from a tri-context workshop at AILA 2024
Abstract
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, from classroom-based micro analyses to overarching sociolinguistic influences to national and institutional policy decisions. 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” (Authors, 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 the 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 not in an attempt to force all EMI into an oft cited ‘one fits all’ mold, but, on the contrary, to showcase how structured comparison can facilitate the identification of areas of divergence. The driving force behind the workshop was to underscore the various factors that contribute to fruitful description of EMI research, factors that may be adjusted based on specific research objectives (e.g., Baker & Hüttner, 2017). 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.