Taking up EMI in Higher Education: The Complexities of Teacher Emotions

Given the status of English as a lingual franca and the ongoing trend of internationalization of higher education, English medium instruction (EMI) has become increasingly popular in many EFL university settings. However, taking up EMI teaching can be an emotionally complex and daunting task for disciplinary teachers. Informed by a post-structuralist perspective, this Forum paper argues for the need to embrace an emotional focus in current EMI teacher education. Based on the critical analysis of a Chinese case, the paper presents and analyzes the complexity of EMI teacher emotions entangled with different power relations and rules in university contexts. The paper culminates in a critical discussion on how to foster and promote EMI teachers’ emotional awareness and intelligence with a view to facilitating their ongoing classroom practice and professional development.