“I don’t care about the physical appearance in a job”

Abstract

Abstract English-medium instruction (EMI) settings can be particularly challenging for lecturers since they must teach disciplinary content through a foreign language. This paper centers on an episode that reflects the demanding nature of EMI classrooms: a student objects to a part of the task instructions provided by the lecturer. Therefore, the objective of this study is first, to investigate the strategies used by an EMI lecturer in managing a challenging episode; and second, to identify the contextual factors that potentially impacted the lecturer’s pedagogical and interactional decisions in this situation. The episode is analyzed using multimodal analysis (Norris, 2004) and ethnographic knowledge from an interview with the lecturer. Findings reveal some degree of struggle in managing the situation adeptly, and suggest that unclearly delivered instructions, a resistance to delving into the underlying reason behind the conflict, an English-only policy, and a degree of language insecurity (and perhaps even lack of proficiency) appear to have played a relevant role in how the episode unfolded and was approached by the lecturer.