First Encounters of the Cold Kind: Psychological Perspectives on Language-Based Inferiority in English-Medium Instruction and Student-Professor Interaction Dynamics

English proficiency is necessary for success in the global business economy, which poses a significant hurdle for nonnative English speakers. This challenge, combined with pressure on non-Anglophone business schools to internationalize, has led many schools to offer English-medium instruction (EMI) courses, in which English is used to teach academic subjects other than English. While past research has predominantly taken a skill-based approach, focusing on how English proficiency affects EMI effectiveness, we take a psychological perspective, drawing on sociometer theory to explore how student self-perceptions of threats to self-esteem may undermine student-professor interactions from the outset. Across four experiments (and two posttests), we demonstrate that self-ascribed nonnative English-speaking business students experience a threat to their self-esteem when anticipating taking EMI courses taught by native English-speaking professors. In response, students self-protect against this threat by making less warm first impressions. Paradoxically, these defensive actions trigger the very reaction students fear: a reduced desire from native English-speaking professors to interact with them. This language-based inferiority threat attenuates when students communicate in their native language or engage in self-affirmation. Our results contribute to the management education literature by highlighting an overlooked psychological dimension of EMI courses and proposing interventions to improve student-professor interaction dynamics.