Speaker's Abstract
Title:
"Rethinking EMI in the Age of Generative AI: Teacher Agency and Classroom Practice"
This talk examines the evolving relationship between English-Medium Instruction (EMI) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in multilingual educational contexts. As EMI expands globally—particularly across Asia—teachers continue to face challenges in supporting students’ disciplinary literacy while balancing content learning with language development. At the same time, emerging tools such as ChatGPT are reshaping how teachers design learning materials, scaffold disciplinary language, and support students’ engagement with complex academic texts.
Drawing on recent empirical research conducted in EMI classrooms in Hong Kong and mainland China, the talk explores how teachers exercise pedagogical agency when integrating generative AI into their teaching practices. The discussion highlights several classroom cases in which teachers used ChatGPT to address language-related challenges, generate instructional materials, and support students’ disciplinary reading and writing. The findings illustrate that the impact of GenAI in EMI classrooms depends not merely on the technology itself, but on how teachers evaluate its affordances, adapt its outputs, and integrate them into context-specific pedagogical practices.
Rather than positioning AI as a replacement for teachers, the seminar argues that generative AI can function as a context-sensitive pedagogical partner, supporting language-content integration and disciplinary literacy development in EMI classrooms. The talk concludes by discussing implications for EMI research, teacher professional development, and the future integration of AI-supported pedagogy in multilingual higher and secondary education.
Jack Pun is Associate Professor in the Department of English at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on English-medium instruction (EMI), disciplinary literacy in STEM education, and communication in healthcare contexts. He has published widely in leading journals and has authored and edited several books with Cambridge University Press and Routledge. He currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Research in Science and Technological Education and sits on the editorial boards of several international journals in applied linguistics and education.
Wenyun Jia is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests lie in applied linguistics, English-medium instruction (EMI), bi/multilingual disciplinary literacy, learner agency, and generative AI in education. Her recent work has been published in journals such as Computer Assisted Language Learning. She is currently investigating how students and teachers perceive and enact bi/multilingual disciplinary literacy practices in high school and university settings, and how these practices intersect with the use of generative AI tools.