“So, you’re speaking Dutch?”

Abstract Lipsky’s (1980) notion of street-level bureaucracy can be used as a novel approach to studying the multilingual practice dimensions of English-medium instruction (EMI) classroom interaction. Existing work has demonstrated how Lipsky’s framework allows us to carefully consider on-the-ground language policy construction by EMI content lecturers, painting a picture of the lecturer as a lens through which institutional language policy is reflected or — at times — refracted in situated classroom practice. This requires an interactional perspective sensitive to the management of frame and participant alignment. In this article, I investigate how negotiation of language policy is brought about interactionally in the EMI classroom. The dataset contains 23 classroom recordings which capture the interactions between six lecturers and their students in two EMI engineering programs at a Belgian university. The data are analyzed interactionally through a combination of Lipsky’s model and frame analysis. This interdisciplinary approach brings into focus the interactional dynamics and distribution of negotiation sequences. In this way, this article contributes to our understanding of the agentive role of the EMI content lecturer while simultaneously valorizing context-sensitive translanguaging in the globalized linguistic-educational practice of English-medium instruction.