Speaker's Abstract
Title:
"Integrating language and law through EMI: A collaborative action research account"
The past decade has witnessed an accelerating expansion of research on English medium instruction (EMI) practices, with a growing body of studies highlighting the importance of fostering students’ discipline-specific literacy to support their content understanding and application. However, the reality is that many EMI teachers are ill-equipped to address students’ linguistic needs, let alone adopt a pedagogical focus on developing discipline-specific literacy. Consequently, there has been a strong call for collaboration between EMI teachers and language specialists to jointly design activities and materials that promote content–language integration in EMI contexts.
In this presentation, I provide a detailed account of a collaborative action research (CAR) project conducted in an EMI law classroom in a Chinese university. The research team, comprising one EMI teacher and two language specialists, engaged in iterative cycles of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting to systematically integrate language-focused pedagogy into legal content instruction. The findings reveal a gradual process of exploration and negotiation between the two parties as they worked to reconcile and integrate their epistemological stances and professional beliefs into classroom practices. Through ongoing communication and analysis of students’ learning responses, the team made systematic efforts to deepen the integration of law-related content and knowledge, moving from the lexical to the discourse level in both course instruction and assessment. The study offers practical insights into the design and delivery of EMI courses that cater to students’ complex learning needs in terms of content understanding and discipline-specific literacy. It also sheds light on the complexities and potential of CAR as a powerful mechanism for supporting EMI teacher development in a reflective and transformative manner.