Teaching approaches and language proficiency among teachers in English-medium education: exploring correlations and pedagogical implications

Journal article, 2025

Whether teachers in English-medium instruction (EMI) contexts possess adequate English skills to teach in their disciplines is widely debated in internationalized higher education. From such debates emerges the assumption that EMI teachers’ approach to teaching is associated with their level of English proficiency; crucially, however, empirical evidence of such a connection is missing. To begin exploring this relationship, this study correlated Scandinavian-based EMI teachers’ (N = 82) scores from English proficiency testing with their responses from a self-assessment of teaching approaches. No correlation was found between English proficiency and a student-focused teaching approach. However, there was a statistically significant negative correlation between English proficiency and a teacher-focused approach, indicating that teachers with lower English skills are likelier to adopt a teacher-focused approach. These findings underscore the complex relationship between EMI teachers’ language proficiency and instructional approaches.