EMI Symposium 2023: Fostering Collaboration 

Abstract

Schools and higher education institutes across the world are using English to teach academic subjects in a desire to internationalise and/or to enhance students’ English proficiency. In view of the challenges encountered by teachers and students in English Medium Instruction (EMI), collaboration has been advocated not only for research, but also for practice. The EMI Symposium 2023 will be co-hosted by the Consortium for Research on Language Policy and Practice of the University of Hong Kong and the EMI Research Group at the University of Oxford. With the theme “Fostering Collaboration”, the symposium will present a global view of EMI with experts from different countries sharing their perspectives.

This joint Symposium will feature:
• plenary speakers in both Hong Kong and Oxford and a joint discussion panel, which will be livestreamed via Teams for free
• invited papers presented in person

Costs:
Online-only registration (for Plenary sessions and panel discussion only): FREE (Register here)
In-person registration for HKU event: FREE (Register here)

Symposium programme (Programme booklet available here):

The full programme of the Symposium is as follows. You can download the abstracts of papers, keynotes and short bio of invited speakers here. The sessions in orange will be shared sessions available to participants at both event locations and online.

Time	Event details		Venue
13:30-14:00	Registration		4/F, Meng Wah Complex
14:00-16:00	Parallel paper sessions		401-402, Meng Wah Complex OR 408-410, Meng Wah Complex
Session 1: 14:00-14:30	Yuen Yi Lo & Tim Weijun Liang Cross-curricular collaboration and teachers’ language awareness in EMI	Julia Chen Collaboration with discipline teachers, education technologists and students: Win-win partnerships
Session 2: 14:30-15:00	Jack Pun Genre-based approach to enhancing secondary students’ English writing ability in science subjects	Rui Yuan & Xuyan Qiu Understanding EMI teachers’ language beliefs and use in content-area classrooms at Chinese universities
Session 3: 15:00-15:30	Sihan Zhou Scaffolding comprehension in EMI university lectures: students’ listening difficulties and strategies	Daniel Fung The language demands in EMI assessment: What vocabulary students need to be taught and by whom?
Session 4: 15:30-16:00	Fan Fang EMI teachers’ perceptions and practices regarding culture teaching in Chinese higher education	BethAnne Paulsrud English-medium instruction in the Swedish school: Collaboration or contestation?
16:00-16:40	Refreshments		4/F, Meng Wah Complex
17:00-18:00	Plenary Speaker in Oxford (livestreamed to HK): Professor Kristina Hultgren The lesser-known drivers of English as a Medium of Instruction in European Higher Education		Meng Wah Complex Theatre 2
18:00-19:00	Plenary Speaker in Hong Kong (livestreamed to Oxford): Professor Guangwei Hu Research on English-medium instruction in the Asia Pacific: An overview
19:00-20:00	Combined discussion panel on EMI research Hong Kong panel: Professor Angel Lin (The Education University of Hong Kong) Dr Jose Lai (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) Mr Wong Kwan Ho (TWGHs Mrs Wu York Yu Memorial College)

Speaker

About the Speaker

Guangwei Hu is Professor and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong. He is an applied linguist by training and specializes in language and literacy education. His research consists of three related strands: (1) second language literacy education in English-as-a-foreign-language contexts; (2) biliteracy acquisition in bilingual and ESL contexts; and (3) academic literacy. His research on academic literacy aims to capture the diversity and complexity of academic literacy practices and offers pedagogical insights and strategies for enhancing the disciplinary literacy of students at various levels of education.

Kristina Hultgren is Professor of Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics at The Open University, UK. She works on the internationalization and Englishization of universities in non-English-dominant countries, linking linguistics to the political economy. Kristina’s work forges interdisciplinary collaborations in the intersection of linguistics and political science to uncover fundamental principles driving Englishization and its consequences for linguistic and social justice. She is Principal Investigator of ELEMENTAL, a large, collaborative, interdisciplinary, UKRI-funded project that seeks to trace the causal mechanism between past decades’ higher education governance reforms and English as a language of teaching in European higher education.

Date

6 December 2023

Time

2pm-8pm (HK)

Location

Meng Wah Complex, The University of Hong Kong

Chair

Dr Yuen Yi Lo