English-Medium Instruction and English for Specific Purposes

Kapitel i bok, 2025

The relationship between English-medium instruction (EMI) and English for specific purposes (ESP) may seem, on first consideration, to be meagre. Their origins are substantially different: while ESP emerged in the wake of World War II, driven in part by increased international student mobility to what have been termed the major English-speaking destination countries (or MESCs; i.e., the English-speaking inner circle), the rapid and much more recent expansion of EMI is in part attributable to a broader global project of internationalisation in higher education. The two differ fundamentally in nature, as well. ESP is a pedagogical approach which foregrounds language learning, contextualizing it in a specific area of endeavor, and using planned teaching and learning activities to achieve explicitly articulated intended learning outcomes related to the development of English proficiency. EMI, by contrast, is not a pedagogy but an instructional setting. Although English language development is frequently a desired outcome of EMI, specific language learning objectives are rarely stated, and any English language development is expected to be achieved through incidental acquisition. EMI contexts, in other words, are those in which "English is not taught but is nonetheless expected to be learned" (Pecorari & Malmström, 2018, pp. 511). Thus, in ESP classrooms English is a central objective, while in EMI classrooms it is often perceived as a means to an end, not an object in its own right. At the same time, the proliferation of EMI has raised questions about the use of English for academic purposes (EAP), frequently situated within specific disciplinary domains, that is, English for specific academic purposes (ESAP). The ESP-EMI interface is therefore a complex one which merits attention. The overarching purpose of this chapter is to explore this relationship by means of synthesizing work which has been done at the ESP-EMI nexus.