Lecturers’ use of examples in online university English-medium instruction: a micro-analytic classroom interaction and knowledge-building perspective

Abstract

The increasing impact of internationalisation in higher education worldwide has led to the growing use of English as a medium of instruction (EMI). Much research on this phenomenon has focused on stakeholders’ viewpoints, but there is increasing interest in investigating interaction in EMI classrooms. One interactional practice which is relatively unexplored is that of EMI lecturers’ use of examples when co-constructing knowledge with students. This study explores how EMI lecturers provide examples to introduce and develop disciplinary content in their field. Using an interdisciplinary approach which combines Multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA) and the Autonomy dimension of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), we analyse three exemplification sequences taken from a corpus of 46 hours of video-recordings of online teaching in three different disciplines (chemistry, business administration, food engineering) at a state EMI university in Turkey. The CA findings of the study show how the lecturers use a range of interactional and multilingual resources in the exemplification sequences to position students as more or less knowledgeable in relation to globally and locally relevant examples. The LCT Autonomy analyses trace the trajectories through which target and non-target knowledge moves as part of lecturers’ knowledge-building practices. The interdisciplinary findings of the study have implications for lecturer training and professional development in English medium universities.