The shift to online teaching has affected every educational setting, including English-Medium Instruction (EMI). However, online EMI is still unexplored (Querol-Julián 2021). To address this gap, this study compares, from a multimodal perspective (O’Halloran et al. 2014) EMI lecturer discourse in face-to-face (F2F) and online distance learning (ODL). The main analytical focus is on variations occurring in lecturer’s use of spatial deixis (Levinson 1983, Fillmore 1997) as a consequence of the reconceptualization of space following the shift to online teaching. Spatial deixis is critical to students’ comprehension as it allows the lecturer to direct students’ attention towards purposeful objects in the space of the classroom in order to create and clarify meanings (Hyland 2005, Bamford 2004, Peeters et al. 2014, Friginal et al. 2017). Students’ comprehension has long been a concern for EMI lecturers (Lasagabaster & Doiz 2021) but the shift to online teaching has further challenged them (Cicillini & Giacosa, 2020). A small corpus of six EMI Engineering lectures was used to investigate how patterns of lexical deictics co-occurring with non-verbal modes – i.e. gestures and “actional resources” (O’Halloran et al. 2014: 251) including mouse movements – are deployed to accomplish specific communicative functions in different lecture modes. Findings indicate that ODL lecturer discourse links students closer to the immediate physical context, such that they can rely on it for interpretation to a greater extent than in F2F. Findings have relevance for the design of computer-assisted teaching methods as a means to develop EMI lecturers’ multimodal competence (Morell 2018).