Teacher professional identities and their impacts on translanguaging pedagogies in a STEM EMI classroom context in China: a nexus analysis

While translanguaging has gained increasing recognition as a multiliteracy pedagogy in English-medium instruction (EMI) education, research exploring its implementation in STEM classroom contexts remains limited. Furthermore, the interplay of EMI teachers’ professional identities and their instructional strategies has received little attention. This qualitative study explores how STEM academics in an EMI programme in China implemented translanguaging pedagogy, developed their professional identities, and examined the impact of identity on their classroom instructional language use. Drawing upon nexus analysis, the study maps the intersecting discourses influencing two EMI lecturers’ divergent language ideologies and translanguaging strategies. The findings highlight the role of teacher identity and agency in navigating institutional and classroom discourses, facilitating planned and effective translanguaging pedagogy. The study reveals identity struggles within the examined institution, where academic staff faced a challenge in balancing their roles as effective EMI teachers and successful researchers due to a discourse of research meritocracy and were constrained in exploring translanguaging pedagogy due to a discourse of internationalism. These challenges undermined their motivation to invest in teaching identity and pedagogical skills. This study underscores the need for a balanced view of research and teaching, more robust teacher evaluation systems, and institutional support to foster effective translanguaging pedagogy in EMI by incorporating teacher identity construction into EMI teacher preparedness

‘It becomes increasingly complex to deal with multiple channels’: materialised communicative competence and digital inequality in English-medium higher education in the digital era

This article explores university students’ communicative competence for English-Medium Instruction (EMI) at a Swedish university in the era of digitalisation and blended learning. Based on a linguistic ethnography, we present an argument for communicative competence as repertoire assemblages orchestrating digital materiality and human language to construct meanings. The study shows how diverse digital multimodalities and AI-language tools are essential features of spatial repertoires for academic communication, and how they cooperate with and mediate students’ personal repertoires to accomplish interactive learning tasks in EMI contexts. The study also highlights how digital diversity in EMI causes a ‘digital divide’, potentially impacting power relations among students. These findings underline the importance of acknowledging the communicative value of digital materiality and negotiating difference and normativity for intercultural academic communication in EMI

Chatbots and other AI for learning: A survey of use and views among university students in Sweden

HIGHLIGHTS - 5,894 students from across Swedish universities were surveyed about their use of and attitudes towards AI for learning purposes, both about chatbots (such ChatGPT) and other AI language tools (such as Grammarly). - 1,707 survey respondents offered individual comments, adding thoughts and reflections about the effective and ethical use of AI in higher education. - Overall, most students are positive towards the use of chatbots and other AI-language tools in education; many claim that AI makes them more effective as learners. - Almost all the respondents are familiar with ChatGPT (but typically not with other chatbots); more than a third use ChatGPT regularly. Students’ knowledge and usage of other AI-language tools, particularly language translation tools, is widespread. - More than half of the respondents express concern about the impact of chatbots in future education; concerns about other types of AI-language tools are much less pronounced. - More than sixty percent believe that the use of chatbots during examination is cheating; this is not the case for other AI-language tools. However, a majority of students is against the prohibition of AI in education settings. - Most students do not know if their educational institutions have rules or guidelines regarding the responsible use of AI; one in four explicitly says that their institution lack such rules or guidelines