On the need for cross-contextual EMI research

Abstract The growth of and attention given to English-medium instruction (EMI) and related topics in contemporary higher education research was well-represented at the AILA 2024 World Congress in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Research reports and symposia from around the globe attest to the fact that EMI remains a consistent area of interest and that many questions and research agendas are being engaged in a number of ways and at a range of levels. This paper takes the opportunity offered by one of the AILA 2024 workshops, namely “Comparative guidelines for cross-contextual EMI research: Policies, people, and practices” ( Siegel, Kumazawa & Zuaro, 2024 ), to reflect on some of the key interrogatives that still accompany EMI as an educational approach, regardless of its context of implementation. Set against the backdrop of multiple EMI sessions at the conference, the workshop is foregrounded as an example of successful cross-contextual EMI description, shedding light on the advantages of adopting similar analytical categories in — sometimes very — different contexts. This is done to showcase how structured comparison can facilitate the identification of areas of divergence. In the present paper, then, we argue in favor of clarity and efficiency in EMI contextual description and suggest avenues for future research that could benefit from cross-contextual studies. We do this by recounting our collaborative experiences and articulating when and in what ways aspects of the road-mapping framework ( Dafouz & Smit, 2020 ), deployed in the workshop itself, emerged naturally since the beginning of our joint work.