Collaboration between content and language teachers in English Medium Instruction

by Natalie Green

My interest in collaboration grew out of an MA TEAP (Teaching English for Academic Purposes) assignment at the University of Nottingham. I had been based in Barcelona for many years, and I was interested in studying whether English was perceived to be a linguistic and cultural threat to lecturers using English as the Medium of Instruction (EMI) in a context that is already bilingual, with a minority regional language (Catalan) and a majority state language (Spanish). It turned out that English was viewed very positively: it was perceived as giving opportunities. My attention turned to the role of language in the EMI classroom because of the following questions that I asked the lecturers (via an online survey):

• Do you teach language in your lessons?
• Should you teach language in your lessons?
• In your assessments of student work, what weighting (or importance) do you give to language use? (Score 0 to 10; 0 = only content counts in the assessment, 10 = only language counts in the assessment)

It was a very small sample (only 7 lecturers), but all concurred that they neither taught nor should teach language in their lessons. The answers in relation to the weighting given to language in their assessments were variable and inconsistent: some gave weightings as high as 7 or 8 to language, others as low as 1 or 2, and a few gave a middle range of 4 or 5. All were teaching similar social science subjects, so disciplinary differences were excluded as a factor. Although with such a small sample it is hard to make generalisations, I felt that there was an issue here that needed to be further investigated. Is it fair for students to be assessed on objectives that are excluded from a course?  Would this not constitute a hidden curriculum?

For this blog post, I will refer to a revised and newly minted definition of EMI, which has been created by Mustafa Akıncıoğlu, the BALEAP EMI SIG convenor.

EMI can be defined as the use of English (for example sole use, partial use, code switching and so on) both by students and content teachers to learn/teach academic subjects (other than English itself) within EMI settings regardless of their locale.

Akıncıoğlu, 2024

This definition does not exclude Anglophone Higher Education contexts, focuses on learning as well as teaching subjects, and clarifies that the use of English may be of varying degrees.

 

Whose responsibility?

In EMI, the literature has repeatedly identified a ‘need to enhance student learning and improve performance in both language and learning’ (Lasagabaster, 2018). On the content and language continuum, EMI is positioned at the farthest point from language:

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is commonly done at primary and secondary educational levels, and has an explicit dual objective of teaching content and language within programmes. ICLHE (Integrated Content and Language in Higher Education) is the equivalent at a higher education level, but is not as common as EMI, perhaps because it requires institutional support and strategy, including investment in teacher training and course design. EMI has no explicit language objective at all, and it is commonly found in research that lecturers do not feel any responsibility to attend to language needs in their classes, whilst the difficulties for language teachers in teaching content-related classes at university is emphasised:

“EMI teachers in the preliminary study firmly believed that teaching English was not their job. They did not consider themselves responsible for their students’ level of English.” (Dearden, 2015)

“a language teacher cannot be a content teacher at tertiary level.” (Airey, 2016)

It is likely that neither can language teachers become equipped to teach content at tertiary level nor content teachers to teach language, without investing scarcely available time in specific training.

I decided to do my dissertation on collaboration between content and language teachers, calling it ‘Collaboration is the Equator’ (Green, 2022), a place where the polarities of language and content come together in a common effort to enhance the learning experience for students. The meeting ground is commonly cited as being Academic Literacies, which are the literacies needed to access content knowledge (e.g., Malmström and Zhou, 2025; Wingate, 2022). EMI may seem a remote educational area to those who are based in the UK, but there is much convergence between the issues and needs found in in-sessional provision, EMI, and Academic Literacies. There is a clear need to make language visible at university (Bond, 2020).

 

Collaboration is a lovely idea, but …

Ever since I have been talking about collaboration between subject and language specialists, I have had enthusiastic reactions from teachers. It is undoubtedly recognised by most as being a good thing to do, and it fits in very well with a social-constructivist educational approach. The interaction between teaching peers and experts in different areas is enriching and results in enhancement of teaching and learning.

That is surely the intention, but teachers have probably all experienced that collaborative work at classroom level can sometimes go very wrong. As teachers collaborating together to design curriculum, plan classroom activities, design assessments, agree on types of feedback, assessment criteria and a pedagogical approach, we certainly have an advantage over our students in terms of maturity, experience, expertise and knowledge. However, there may be several factors that obstruct a successful collaboration. In fact, our maturity, experience, expertise and knowledge may precisely be the blocks to successful collaboration, although personal factors may be outweighed by external factors that are beyond our control. More about this later.

 

Types of Collaboration

My dissertation explored attitudes to collaboration, types of effective collaboration and factors in successful collaboration. Two parallel surveys were launched via Microsoft Forms, with mixed methods questions, directed at CS (Content Specialists) and LS (Language Specialists).

My definition of collaboration is “any event, activity or interaction (or series of those) which encourages connections between LS and CS)” (Green, 2022). This fits in very well with Lasagabaster’s (2018) concept of team teaching, which consists of the activities listed below, together with other examples from the literature.

Tandem teaching ·       Team teaching (Lasagabaster, 2018), e.g.: Lesson observations Longitudinal analysis of student performance Needs analysis Surveys, focus groups, interviews Creation of a set of criteria Creation of a handbook for lesson observations Creation of a language guide for students and EMI teachers ·       Training for EAP tutors in a specific discipline (Galloways and Rose, 2021) ·       Training for Content Specialists (including consultations or advice) to develop a language pedagogy (Galloway and Rose, 2021) ·       Research collaboration (Macaro, 2018; Airey, 2020; Macaro, 2020)

In my survey, the most common forms of collaboration were shared between curriculum design, course design and lesson planning. Consultations/tutorials/seminar sessions also scored fairly highly and so did tandem teaching (two teachers present in the same session), surprisingly, as this is resource-heavy and logistically difficult to organise. A smaller number of participants mentioned assessment collaboration and research collaboration, which is reported as a deficit research area at the moment (Macaro, 2020).

Broadly speaking, most participants thought that teaching methods, curriculum and assessment need to change in order to adapt EMI courses to international students. A few did not believe that changes needed to be made because they felt that the courses were already adapted.

Here is a fantastic course adaptation that was reported by one of the Content Specialist respondents (CR2):

I’ve touched upon some of these above, but we are already doing the following: –          Providing English captioning –          Providing keywords in Mandarin –          Providing ILOs in Mandarin –          Asking a Chinese colleague (we are co-teaching with a Chinese university) to stand in to support learning in lectures, to explain difficult concepts etc. in Mandarin if required –          Tailoring our Foundation Year in discussion with our English language teaching colleagues – to reduce the transition ‘shock’ into the first year of their clinical sciences degree –          Creating a glossary of terms –          Pre-recorded lectures (again with captions) and either flipping the classroom, and/or playing these in lecture slots, with pauses for Q&A etc –          Ensuring lectures are tightly focussed around ILOs and minimising tangents however interesting! –          Review order in which we’re teaching to ensure better spiral learning and scaffolding

This respondent worked in a transnational partnership between a British and a Chinese university. While he was based in the UK, he was designing a programme for the Chinese university, in collaboration with the EAP department of the British university. In our CALD context, the extent to which we can leverage L1 language use to help students acquire content is different, but there may be ways that can be devised to allow some kind of translation to occur (effective use of AI tools, for example). Trying to stop students using L1 is usually viewed now as ineffective and as an out-of-date linguistic pedagogical approach.

In addition to this change of attitude in the use of L1, a student-centred approach is often recommended in the literature (e.g. Biggs, Tang and Kennedy, 2022; Cots, 2013; Macaro and Searle, 2025), which is very different to the formerly prevalent knowledge-transmission lecture method in HE, and which emphasises the benefits of students taking increased agency in their learning.

 

Success Factors

I concluded from my findings that teacher attitudes were significant in creating a successful collaboration:

• Good communication and rapport between Content Specialists and Language Specialists
• Open attitudes
• Motivation to improve student engagement (focus on student need)
• Mutual learning

However, one logistical factor also emerged:

• The need for a coordinator or moderator

Tandem teaching was highly regarded as a valuable experience, together with integrated lesson design and embedded language into content courses.

A highly positive attitude is encapsulated by a Content Specialist (CR2), who made the following comment on collaboration:

It has informed not only our development of teaching and learning in the clinical science years, but also tailoring of the English foundation year. Insights from our English language teaching colleagues are invaluable and essential, not just in improving our own teaching and supporting students, but also raising those unknown unknowns that we wouldn’t have thought to consider.

This respondent was in fact a coordinator, and it is evident that he made a very important positive contribution to the collaborative initiative within his own institution.

 

Barriers to Collaboration

The success factors above mostly fall within the personal factor category: they are factors that are within the control of the individual, and relate to collaborator attitudes. However, another respondent who is a language specialist (LR16) points to potential problems when summarising necessary factors for successful collaboration:

Collaboration requires expertise, time and investment from both academics and EAP/Academic skills providers. Expectations from both parties need to be managed. There is huge potential for EAP/Academic skills providers to become embedded (deep-embedded = tandem teaching, input into wording of assessments/criteria, co-marking of assessments).

In my survey, there was one barrier that was identified over and over again as the most significant one: lack of time. Other barriers were mentioned (much less frequently and possibly related to the time factor): lack of commitment of institutions and management; Content Specialist resistance and lack of understanding of EAP; Language Specialist lack of understanding of the Academy and of content.

This ‘lack of time’ issue points to external factors that cannot be controlled by the individual, and correspond to issues found in the literature:

• Neoliberal pressures on institutions (Warwick, 2014; Hamp-Lyons, 2015;): “commodification and McDonaldisation” and outsourcing of EAP courses (Bell, 2025; Ding and Bruce, 2017)
• Sustainability of collaboration affected by “insufficient institutional support and time constraints” (Malmström and Zhou, 2025)
• Lack of training and institutional guidelines in EMI (Bowles and Murphy, 2020; Macaro et al. 2018; Lauridsen, 2020; Galloway and Ruegg, 2020; Lasagabaster, 2018; Dearden, 2015; O’Dowd, 2018; Lauridsen and Lillemose, 2015)
• Lack of training of EAP practitioners (Campion, 2016; Ding and Campion, 2016; Ding and Bruce, 2017; Bell, 2021)
• Status of EAP within the Academy (Raimes, 1991; Ding and Bruce, 2017; Bell, 2021; Bell, 2025) and unequal power relations (Malmström and Zhou, 2025, Ploettner, 2019)

There are also potential barriers that point to the need for effective coordination of collaboration:

• Defining shared teaching objectives and differing language ideologies (Malmström and Zhou, 2025)
• Unclear division of responsibilities and negotiation of responsibilities (Malmström and Zhou, 2025)

 

Conclusions and recommendations

Collaboration between Content and Language Specialists is often proffered as being capable of producing tailor-made courses that are sensitive to context, while providing situated development opportunities for teachers. Overall, successful collaboration, which is perceived to be so necessary to enhance the quality of teaching and learning in EMI, requires a profound change of perceptions leading to a change of educational mindset (Doran, Rieker and Yang, 2025).

It needs to be emphasised that “isolated pockets of initiative” are not enough (Lauridsen, 2020). There is a need for strategic, intentional implementation of EMI, and a whole institution initiative including an institutional policy (Bond, 2020). Lecturer perceptions need to change and to take on an international pedagogy which will accommodate international students better, and improve the experience for all students (international, home and widening participation). The EAP department is perfectly equipped to take on an influential role in this educational transformation: they could be considered the experts of internationalisation, contributing significantly to the development of an international curriculum within HE, international pedagogy and intercultural competence development. All of this would be suited to preparing the students to function professionally in a global world. None of this is achievable if we do not have the time to achieve this transformation.

Instead of viewing EMI as a problem, if we leverage the strengths of both EMI and EAP professionals (subject and language specialists), then educational transformation is possible to achieve.

In our CALD context, as we prepare Curriculum 26, if we really want to achieve a flagship programme, then we will need to take care of multiple aspects: coordination of collaborations between teachers, agreement on division of responsibilities, clarification of tasks, overall objectives and pedagogical approach; sufficient allocation of time especially in the initial stages of course creation, then also later in monitoring and reviewing the courses once they are launched. It would seem advisable to create stable subject/language collaboration clusters consisting of teachers who regularly interact with each other over time, in this way, developing relationships of understanding and trust. We could be mapping out unchartered territory in Curriculum 26: the literature calls for increased collaboration between content and language teachers and proposes this as a solution to student challenges, but there is a reported research gap in this area (Cots 2013; Macaro et al., 2018; Galloway and Ruegg, 2020; Bond 2020; Macaro 2020; Galloway and Rose 2021). However, the situation is moving on very rapidly, and increasingly research and scholarship is being generated on collaborations and their effect (in fact, Wingate, 2022 argues that the fields of academic literacies and genre analysis have already provided studies of inter-disciplinary collaboration). We have an exciting research opportunity here which could contribute something valuable to the larger HE community both in the UK and internationally.

 

Reference List

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