Impact of teacher collaboration on teachers’ practices and classroom interaction in EMI in higher education

Abstract

In English medium instruction (EMI) contexts, students often encounter difficulties when learning content knowledge through their second/foreign/additional language (L2). Teacher collaboration (TC) between content and language specialists has been regarded as a potential approach to facilitating student learning in these contexts, since during collaboration, teachers can become more language aware and subsequently better integrate content and language teaching. While previous research has revealed the impact of TC on student learning, little attention has been paid to how it may affect teachers’ instructional practices and classroom interaction. To fill this research gap, this quasi-experimental study invited a drama course instructor and a language instructor at a Chinese university to collaborate to revise the course objectives and instructional activities. The drama instructor then used the revised materials with the experimental class (25 students) while practising her normal content-oriented teaching in the control class (25 students). Data were collected with lesson observations and recordings in the two classes, as well as semi-structured interviews with the two teachers and selected students. Drawing on the notion of language-related episodes (LREs), this study reported the differences in classroom interaction patterns between the two classes. The findings show that through collaboration with the language teacher, the drama instructor incorporated more LREs in different aspects, especially in vocabulary and text structure, in the experimental class than in her control class. These findings yield pedagogical implications for TC and for promoting classroom interaction in the EMI classroom.