Accommodation Strategies Employed by Non-native English-Mediated Instruction (EMI) Teachers

The goal of this study was to explore English instructors’ application of accommodation strategies under English-Mediated Instruction (EMI) in English as a lingua franca context of higher education in Taiwan. English instructors’ verbal discourses with regard to various types of strategies during instruction were documented and examined. The presented results were triangulated in terms of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Data were gathered from a university in southern Taiwan, which included approximately 627 min of audio-recordings of five courses by five non-native teachers in its IMBA program. The collected data were analyzed through the use of frequency, pragmatic functions, display of lexicon and syntax, and the most common clusters. Corpora and interviews were chosen to be the primary analytic tools. Six effective accommodation strategies were identified via quantitative analysis, including introducing, defining, listing, eliciting, giving examples, and emphasizing. The selection of the accommodation strategies was influenced by the following situations: (1) level of content difficulty, (2) students’ language proficiency, (3) student feedback, and (4) finding appropriate language. Finally, top-ten language clusters frequently produced by the EMI instructors were found to serve the purposes of eliciting and defining concepts. Possible pedagogical implications are also discussed in the last section.