Why context matters in English-Medium Instruction (EMI): Reflections based on experience in the Italian university system and in an EU-funded programme for early-career scholars.

This paper presents and motivates a framework for analysing English-Medium Instruction (EMI) in Higher Education from a comparative perspective with a focus on teaching by disciplinary specialists in non-immersion (lingua franca) settings. Drawing on a dual notion of context (societal, top-down; emergent, bottom-up) three contextual factors are discussed and their pertinence to EMI illustrated: (i) language repertoires and language ideologies (what other languages are present in the context, what value is attributed to these languages and to English); (ii) cultural expectations about the teaching-learning process (how students and teachers expect themselves and others to act in pedagogic interactions); (iii) the degree to which educational and hiring policies (national, institutional) reflect a market orientation to HE. The discussion of this third aspect breaks new ground in the applied linguistics literature by drawing on the GATS, 1995, definitions of modes of cross-borders exchange in order to recast EMI as part of the broader process of the international provision of educational services. A typology of types of students and teachers that can be found in EMI classrooms is then presented. This typology draws on previous typologies proposed by Smit (2010) and Fontanet-Gómez (2013) but takes students’ and faculty members’ institutional status explicitly into consideration; this fact makes it possible to take the three contextual factors identified as pertinent to EMI more systematically into account. The final section of the paper illustrate the utility of the framework proposed for the comparative analysis of English-Medium Instruction by using it to highlight variation in EMI within the Italian context and continuities across European settings with similar contextual characteristics.