Pedagogical mediation in EMI: how teachers mediate multilingual classroom realities in Thai higher education

This study explores EMI teachers’ perspectives on multilingual pedagogical practices and pedagogical tensions in Thai higher education. Adopting a qualitative interpretivist design, the study drew on semi-structured interviews with 68 EMI teachers from eight Thai universities, supplemented by 16 non-participant classroom observations. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings revealed that Thai teachers viewed EMI as a complex educational practice extending beyond the use of English as the language of instruction. The EMI teachers described EMI classrooms as multilingual environments in which disciplinary knowledge, classroom participation, assessment, and communication were continuously negotiated through multiple linguistic resources. They also reported using multilingual pedagogical practices to facilitate disciplinary understanding, support classroom interaction, and address students’ varying levels of English proficiency. The findings highlighted teachers’ concerns regarding participation inequalities, linguistic visibility, assessment fairness, and tensions between institutional internationalization goals and classroom realities. Assessment emerged as a particularly contested area, with participants describing ongoing challenges in balancing disciplinary knowledge, language proficiency, and educational equity. The study contributes to EMI research by reconceptualizing EMI teachers as pedagogical mediators who coordinate language, disciplinary learning, classroom participation, assessment, and institutional expectations within multilingual higher education classrooms.