Exploring the Meaning of ‘E’ in EMI in Different Perspectives and Its Pedagogical Implications

Abstract

As the significant language in academic, English play an important role in the internationalization of higher education. Many educational institutions having teach knowledge through English and countless publications and articles are tagged and written in English, the educational process is called English as a medium of instruction or EMI (Kirkpatrick, 2014). In Europe, one important motivator of EMI is Bologna process. Till now, there are hundreds of thousands of non-English-speaking students going to English-speaking countries to go for further education. And this number is still increasing every year. Accordingly, it is necessarily to explore the conception of English and what roles or meanings are tagged in “E” in EMI (Baker & Huttner, 2017). In this paper, diverse roles of English will be elaborated according to relevant literature from scholars and forms arguments of this paper based on above, in the meanwhile, some pedagogical implications of English used in subject instructions will also be concerned in the paper.