Co-constructing knowledge through pedagogical storying in English-medium instruction classrooms:

An interdisciplinary investigation in Turkish higher education

Fatma Ege-Kadıoğlu

PhD Thesis

Advisor: Dr. Hale Işık-Güler

(Expected) Date of Completion: January 2026

The growing prevalence of English-medium instruction can be observed in higher education, particularly in Europe. Even though the scrutiny of classroom discourse in EMI contexts has been the focal point of many studies, the use of storytelling to build knowledge is yet to be explored. The purpose of this research is to examine how pedagogical storying instances of lecturers are designed and how these interactions contribute to co-construction of content knowledge. Using the frameworks of multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA) and the Autonomy dimension of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), this study aims to explore the interactional and sequential organization of lecturers' pedagogical storying, and how these stories are positioned within the broader epistemic and social structures of the classroom. The dataset includes around 18-hour video-recorded classroom interactions at the tertiary level, drawn from English Medium Instruction Corpus (EMIC). The preliminary findings of this research highlight diverse interactional and multimodal resources deployed by lecturers to launch pedagogical storying, to shape student recipiency, and to end these interactional episodes. Also, the lecturers employ various autonomy tours while linking the storying to the target content to build core knowledge. The findings of this research will shed light on the role of pedagogical storying in fostering student comprehension and may well have a bearing on pre- and/or in-service training and professional development of EMI lecturers.