ONLINE AND ENGLISH AS MEDIA OF INSTRUCTION AT THE UNIVERSITY.

The internationalisation of higher education (IoHE) has been severely affected by the current restrictions on global mobility due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, the abrupt mass migration of traditional university courses to the internet has led to the intersection of two emerging trends (Querol-Julián & Crawford Camiciottoli, 2019) in international HE: English-Medium Instruction (EMI) and Online Distance Learning (ODL). This study examines lecturer’s talk in an EMI engineering class at an Italian university, in two different learning formats: conventional face-to-face (F2F) instruction, and online synchronous video lectures (SVLs). Nearly 12 hours of classroom observation data were collected from six lectures and analysed by making use of a Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) and multimodal framework (Morell, 2018). Studies in Europe have found that EMI lecturers often lack good oral communication skills in English (Dimova & Kling, 2018) while their lack of self-confidence as NNS English lecturers prevents them from effectively engaging students in extended verbal exchanges (García Mayo, 2006: 165). However, more recent studies on traditional classroom interaction have considered verbal language simply one of several modes that are active in the classroom. Given that online learning settings are characterised by an even higher combination of modes (e.g. speech, writing, gesture, image and space, but also emoji, hyperlink), what are the “affordances of each mode” used in the EMI virtual classroom? (Kress et al., 2014). Do they offer EMI lecturers differing possibilities for interacting and meaning-making? The findings of this study have implications for designing customized support training for EMI lecturers.