Internationalization and globalization have led to the increasing implementation of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in non-Anglophone higher education institutions. EMI typically favors a monolingual policy of using only one language in university classrooms. However, recent studies (e.g., Bozbıyık & Balaman, 2023; Tai & Wei, 2021) have shown that participants (lecturers and students) utilize their full multimodal repertoires in meaning-making and knowledge-building processes. This practice is described as “translanguaging”.

In this seminar, I will present different translanguaging practices as interactional and pedagogical resources in online and face-to-face undergraduate and graduate EMI university classrooms in Türkiye and Spain. Using multimodal Conversation Analysis, the presentation will explore how lecturers and students deploy translanguaging to (1) deal with understanding problems, (2) complete assigned group tasks, and (3) connect academic knowledge with students’ experience for knowledge-building purposes in different fields. In doing so, this talk also shows different linguistic and multimodal dimensions of translanguaging including English, native language (Turkish or Spanish in different contexts) in addition to field-, university-, culture-specific expressions and embodied resources in undergraduate and graduate classrooms.

Finally, this talk shares implications for higher education EMI classroom interactions and EMI teacher education. It describes the multilingual, multifaceted, multimodal, and sequential organization of face-to-face and online environments in different classroom contexts.

References

Bozbıyık, M., & Balaman, U. (2023). The role of translingual peer involvement in resolving understanding troubles in the English medium of instruction classroom. System, 113, 103003.
 
Tai, K. W., & Wei, L. (2021). Co-Learning in Hong Kong English medium instruction mathematics secondary classrooms: A translanguaging perspective. Language and Education, 35(3), 241–267.

Merve Bozbiyik