Within the rapidly growing research field of English-medium education in higher education, in recent years more and more studies have started taking into account the multilingual realities present in the context of English-medium programs (e.g. Dafouz & Smit 2020, Baker & Hüttner 2019). However, studies have also called for further research into the complex roles of languages within EME as well as for putting students – as key stakeholders – at the center of attention of EMEMUS research (Dafouz & Smit 2022). To address this gap, the present study provides an in-depth investigation into the ways undergraduate EME students draw on their linguistic repertoires for maneuvering their pluriliterate higher education experience. It aims to foreground students' voices and to shed light on final-year bachelor students' reflections on their disciplinary literacy development throughout their studies and the roles their L1s, the main educational language of their institution (German) and English have played in this process. To this end, in-depth interviews (each between 60 and 90 minutes long) were conducted with 19 of a highly international cohort of 68 students on an Austrian business EMP. The students' narrations highlight the complex and diversified ways by which students employed their linguistic repertoires during the three years of their degree, a significant part of which was restricted to pandemic-induced online education. Findings also show multi-layered and highly situation-dependent roles of languages for teaching, learning and community building in the context of the EMP. More specifically, the study identifies different trajectories of how students used their plurilingual resources while developing the disciplinary literacies relevant for completing their studies successfully. These trajectories are contingent on various factors, such as the country of the students' high school education, their prior work experience, and the area of specialization of their bachelor papers. Furthermore, results indicate pedagogical hierarchies among the languages present in the EMP, enacted by the lecturers and partly by the students themselves.
References:
Baker, W., & Hüttner, J. (2019). "We are not the language police": Comparing multilingual EMI programmes in Europe and Asia. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 29(1), 78–94.
Dafouz, E., & Smit, U. (2022). Towards multilingualism in English‑medium higher education. Journal of English-Medium Instruction, 1(1), 29–47.
Dafouz, E., & Smit, U. (2020). ROAD-MAPPING English medium education in the internationalised university. Palgrave Pivot. Palgrave Macmillan.
