Pedagogy in Teaching through English Medium Instruction—Academics’ Cases in a Chinese University

As a result of two decades of development, the trajectory of English medium instruction (EMI) research has moved from the identification of problems towards a focus on pedagogy. In response to studies in the literature claiming that the dominant approach in EMI pedagogy is the direct transmission of knowledge, and calls for research investigating classroom discourse in EMI teaching, this study explores the pedagogical features enacted by bilingual EMI academics in a Chinese university’s EMI program. The participants were four academics who were teaching a subject in parallel across both EMI and CMI student cohorts. The research employs Paulo Freire’s framework of dialogic teaching as the theoretical lens and focused on investigating moments in which the EMI lecturers ‘dialogued’, engaged, and/or interacted with students in their EMI classes. This research found that, in spite of their varied disciplines, the lecturers mostly implemented expository teaching in their EMI and CMI classes in general. The efforts of individual academics in relation to intellectual equality, the wellbeing of students, and the encouragement of critical thinking through dialogue and interaction were identified. However, due to the academics positioning themselves as experts in subject knowledge, the tendency in their teaching was characterized as monologic rather than dialogic. This research contests a major theme in the literature, which is that the academics’ English (EMI teaching), in reference to their first language (L1), is not the major contributor to their pedagogical approach.