Academic reading and disciplinary discourse engagement at the EME/ICLHE interface

Other conference contribution, 2025

The seemingly unstoppable spread of English as a lingua franca continues to affect students’ higher education (HE) experiences in multiple ways. In addition to listening to lectures and engaging in seminars in English when English is medium of education, many students in HE encounter English through English texts assigned to them by teachers (books, articles, reports, novels, standards, manuals etc.). Notably, students are often expected to engage with English texts even when instruction and classroom interaction occur in the local language. This practice creates a partial English-medium education context, exposing students to the discourses of their discipline in (at least) two languages: the local or national language and English. The conditions for learning surrounding such partial EME environments – and the conditions for (bi-/multilingual) exposure to disciplinary discourse – remain a poorly understood aspect of HE, despite the widespread adoption of this practice in many geographical contexts. In this presentation, my starting point is this question: To what extent are undergraduate students exposed to disciplinary discourse – in the local language and English –   through reading assignments, and what are the implications for their disciplinary learning and development of disciplinary literacy? The presentation features ongoing work in Sweden and includes two primary sources of data, (i) a survey with a (randomized) representative sample of 1,000 students, eliciting their views on academic reading; and (ii), a sample of reading lists collected from ≈ 2,750 undergraduate courses representing all major disciplines from across Swedish higher education institutions. Knowing more about how disciplinary discourses are presented in different languages contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics (and tensions) inherent in partial EME settings. This research highlights the interplay between language(s) and content in shaping students’ disciplinary learning experience and offers insights into the multilingual realities of higher education.