Collaborative EMI

Abstract The rapid expansion of English-medium instruction (EMI) in higher education has generated a substantial body of research on student outcomes, language development, and classroom practice. Much of this work has focused on students’ English proficiency as a key determinant of success. Yet across EMI contexts, a consistent pattern emerges: students who meet institutional language requirements still encounter significant challenges in engaging with disciplinary knowledge through English. In this paper, we argue that EMI has been widely misdiagnosed as a problem of student language ability when it is more accurately understood as a problem of institutional design. In many universities, language development and disciplinary teaching are organised separately, leaving students to navigate the relationship between them on their own. Previous research has highlighted the value of collaboration between language specialists and disciplinary lecturers in EMI settings. We build on this work by examining how such collaboration can be embedded beyond individual classrooms and initiatives, and sustained across policy, programme design, and pedagogy. Drawing on recent EMI research and illustrative institutional examples, we outline how collaboration can be organised across these levels and identify practical mechanisms through which it can be enacted within programmes. We argue that improving EMI requires a shift away from proficiency-driven models toward approaches that coordinate linguistic and disciplinary expertise within programmes. In this sense, collaborative EMI offers a way of rethinking how universities organise teaching through English.