More Than Meets the Eye: Rethinking How We Analyze EMI Classroom Interaction

Date

2025-12-06

Author

Şimşek, Asuman
Topal, Pınar

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Analysis of video-recorded classroom interaction has become a cornerstone in applied linguistics (AL) research, as it enables fine-grained, multimodal analyses of naturally occurring teaching practices. However, as these analyses often rely solely on interpretive procedures carried out by applied linguists, a gap emerges between researchers’ AL-informed perspectives and practitioners’ discipline-specific EMI practices, creating interpretive blindspots in which researchers lacking content expertise may misread or oversimplify instructors’ practices and, in turn, produce incomplete accounts of disciplinary complexity and of what counts as adequate explanation and understanding (Macaro, 2018; 2022). With this in mind, this study investigates how micro analyses of video-recorded classroom interactions in EMI settings map against teachers’ accounts elicited via retrospective interviews in order to discern the points of divergence between the outcomes of the two analytical procedures. For this purpose, a 14-hour subset of the English-Medium Instruction Corpus (EMIC), developed at a state university in Türkiye, and subsequent retrospective interviews with instructors of multiple disciplines (Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, and Biological Sciences) are examined. The comparison of initial analyses of classroom interactions and the instructors’ own retrospective accounts of the events reveal that practices construed by analysts as deliberate pedagogical decisions in classroom interactions are accounted for as “unconscious” or incidental accomplishments by EMI instructors, influenced by implicit motivations rooted in teachers’ enthusiasm or experiential engagement. Furthermore, retrospective interviews highlighted disciplinary nuances that were overlooked in researcher analyses, likely due to the AL researcher’s lack of discipline-specific insights. Findings suggest that the triangulation of such analyses with members’ accounts and a genuine collaboration between EMI researchers and practitioners may enhance the reliability of analyses and contribute to more nuanced understandings of EMI classroom interaction and offer a means of countering potential leaps of judgment. The implications concerning EMI classroom interaction research are discussed.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/119202

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Department of Foreign Language Education, Conference / Seminar