English Medium Instruction Policies and Practices

The adoption of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) has expanded rapidly across primary, secondary and higher education worldwide, driven by aspirations to enhance global competitiveness, foster internationalisation and respond to labour-market demands. Governments and institutions have formulated policies that range from top-down directives mandating EMI programmes to bottom-up initiatives led by individual schools and faculties. These policies often intersect with local language ideologies, raising questions of equity, access and social justice. In many contexts, monolingual English-only mandates contend with the lived multilingual realities of classrooms, where teachers and learners engage in translanguaging to negotiate comprehension and participation. Pedagogical practices have evolved to integrate multilingual resources, digital tools and collaborative learning strategies to support students with varying levels of English proficiency. Research has also highlighted the role of teacher identity and agency in implementing EMI curricula, demonstrating that institutional support and professional development are critical for effective delivery. Despite its promise, EMI presents challenges related to epistemic access, as linguistic barriers can impede meaningful engagement with specialised content, potentially reproducing inequities. Ongoing debates focus on the balance between internationalisation goals and the preservation of local languages, the decolonisation of curricula and the design of inclusive assessment practices. Emerging studies emphasise the need for context-sensitive policy enactment, participatory decision-making and robust evaluation frameworks to ensure EMI fulfils its educational and societal objectives.

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English Medium Instruction Policies and Practices publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in english medium instruction policies and practices across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

English Medium Instruction (EMI): Educational provision in which English is used as the primary language for teaching academic subjects rather than for teaching English language itself.

Translanguaging: The pedagogical practice in which multilingual speakers use their full linguistic repertoire to facilitate comprehension, participation and knowledge construction in the classroom.

Epistemic Access: The degree to which learners can engage with, contribute to and critically understand disciplinary knowledge, often influenced by linguistic proficiency.

Policy Enactment: The ways in which official language policies are interpreted, adapted and implemented at the institutional, classroom and individual levels.

References

1. Enactment of English medium instruction in under-resourced educational contexts: A case of multilingual public secondary schools in Nepal. System (2024).
2. Teacher professional identities and their impacts on translanguaging pedagogies in a STEM EMI classroom context in China: a nexus analysis. Language and Education (2023).
3. Teaching through English: Monolingual Policy Meets Multilingual Practice. HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business (2017).