Pınar Turan

PhD Thesis

Advisor: Dr. Hale Işık-Güler

(Expected) Date of Completion: January 2027

Sites of practical training in English-medium higher education, such as labs, design studios, and sports halls, where instruction takes place in a fundamentally embodied and multi-semiotic nature, add to the research-supported "problematisation of the English-only approach to EMI policy" (Sahan & Rose, 2021) through the diverse multimodal and heteroglossic interactional practices (Lin, 2015) they involve. While previous EMI research has largely addressed classical classroom settings, this study explores active learning environments (ALE), known for their student-fronted and interactional nature. Such research-led support for a multilingual and multimodal social semiotic view promotes multilingually resourceful pedagogical policies expanding the E in EMI beyond a rigid "code".

The proposed study attempts to fill this gap through its engagement in 55 hours of naturally-occurring EMI classroom data, supported by stimulated-recall interviews with the instructors to advance our emic understanding of the matter. In particular, the study will adopt a transdisciplinary approach by incorporating Multimodal Conversation Analysis (Mondada, 2011, 2018) and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis (Gillings et al., 2023) in order to explore active learning environments such as laboratories, fieldwork modules, design studios, through video-recorded EMI classroom interactional data; while complementing it with video-stimulated recall interviews with instructors to see how instructors, students, and other participants use the conversational space across various task-based instructional contexts in a leading EMI HEI in Turkiye. Preliminary findings indicate that EMI ALEs foster interaction through complex power dynamics where the instructor's authority is shared among co-instructors, guests, assistants, and also students; highlighting the significance of active learning processes in shaping participation frameworks. The analysis also reveals the different multimodal resources instructors use to establish, maintain, and distribute authority, particularly regarding language use, disciplinary knowledge, and task management.

Whether it be a guest in a food science fair tasting the product and telling the points of improvement to a student, or a teaching assistant sharing the duty of orchestrating a task, EMI instructors in the observed ALEs share their deontic primacy with others. Having multiple parties with deontic authority in a classroom affords a unique benefit: EMI students have the opportunity to get one-to-one interactional time with professionals, tailored to improve their learning process, unlike a classical lecture setup, where a student is more likely not to get a single turn of talk.

The policy side of this reality is pronounced in terms of the internationalization efforts of higher education institutions, particularly with regards to university rankings, often including the instructor-per-student ratio as a factor in determining the quality time a student gets to spend with a disciplinary expert. However, the shared authority with disciplinary experts seen in active learning environments highlights the importance of the instructors having the time to engage with students in more meaningful ways. The significance of deontics in the EMI classrooms is also hinted at in a previous study on the instructors' question design in Turkish EMI:

"The roles of the classroom members are not equal, which means that while the lecturers are in power in most of the classrooms, learners do not enjoy keeping control of the patterns of interaction." (Genç & Yüksel, 2021, p.14).

All in all, by situating these interactions within broader institutional and professional discourses, the study contributes to an emerging understanding of how EMI classrooms function as sites of linguistic and disciplinary socialization. This dissertation will discuss the implications concerning EMI as an internationalization policy and EMI as a pedagogy.

References

Genc, E., & Yuksel, D. (2021). Teacher questions in English medium instruction classrooms in a Turkish higher education setting. Linguistics and Education, 66, 100992. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2021.100992

Gillings, M., Mautner, G., & Baker, P. (2023). Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168144

Lin, Angel M. Y. (2015). "Egalitarian Bi/Multilingualism and Trans-semiotizing in a Global World." In The Handbook of Bilingual and Multilingual Education, edited by Wayne E. Wright, Sovicheth Boun, and Ofelia García, 19–37. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell.

Mondada, L. (2011). Understanding as an embodied, situated and sequential achievement in interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(2), 542-552. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.08.019

Mondada, L. (2018). Multiple temporalities of language and body in interaction: Challenges for transcribing multimodality. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51(1), 85–106.

Sahan, K., & Rose, H. (2021). Problematising the E in EMI: Translanguaging as a Pedagogic Alternative to English-only Hegemony in University Contexts. In English-Medium Instruction and Translanguaging (pp. 1-14). Multilingual Matters.