About
Sin-Yi Chang completed her PhD in Second Language Education from the University of Cambridge and is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University. Sin-Yi's research interests lie in the field of educational linguistics, with a focus on critical perspectives on English medium instruction (EMI), language policy, and bi/multilingual education. Before her academic career, Sin-Yi was a secondary school English language teacher in Taipei, Taiwan.
Taming a wild tongue in the EMI classroom? Educators as language policymakers
This presentation highlights the agentive dimension of teaching by positioning educators as language policymakers. The presentation is divided into three parts. Building on Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of borderlands and her writings on “taming a wild tongue”, I first conceptualize EMI spaces as “borderlands” in higher education, located at the margins of what is usually considered mainstream (i.e., teaching in the L1). Then, I examine the different geographical, linguistic, and epistemic borders that EMI (re)creates, and call for the need to foreground and embrace the multilingual reality of EMI. To cross such borders and explore different possibilities between blindly supporting and resisting EMI, in the final part of the presentation I share examples of classroom language planning from ten leading EMI professors in Taiwan (i.e., those who have received EMI teaching awards, led multiple EMI professional development workshops, or been given seed instructor titles in their respective institutions).