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Learner strategies in EMI

Introduction

In Chapter 4 we attempted to arrive at a global picture of what EMI students believe about
studying through a medium that is predictably not the most comfortable language for them to study in.
In this chapter I will try to complement Chapter 4 by taking the learner perspective, not in
terms of beliefs but in terms of what they might do to help themselves thrive in an EMI context. In
order to do so, I am going to refer to the broad field of research in whose various titles the word
‘strategies’ appears, and I have therefore used the label ‘learner strategies’ in the title of this chapter
(although others such as ‘learning strategies’ have been used in the past). I will refer to how learners
use strategies as ‘strategic behaviour’ (Macaro, 2009).

The gap, or lack of synergy, that exists between second language acquisition (SLA) research and
educational research has resulted (as we shall see) in little or no learner strategies research in EMI
classrooms. It will be one of the aims of this chapter to bring together what we know about learner
strategies in SLA in order to position it in the context of EMI. First, however, we need to navigate our
way as efficiently as possible across the difficult terrain of the language learner strategies literature.
We need to begin by defining our terms and by spending some time discussing learner strategies
theory and its claims. This will include aspects of the theory such as levels of linguistic knowledge
and prior knowledge of the topic. Both of these, I will propose, have a major role to play in our
understanding of how content and language interact. Only then will it be possible to describe any
existing empirical research on strategic behaviour in EMI and to offer a future research programme.

Theoretical perspectives on learner strategies

In the SLA historical timeline, learner strategies theory and research go back to two seminal papers.
The first was by Rubin (1975), in which she referred to the concept of the Good Language Learner
(GLL), a concept quickly followed by Stern (1975), who suggested ten language learning strategies
that could be used to recognize the GLL. Descriptions of and theories about the GLL have been added
in a host of publications, from Naiman, Fröhlich, Stern, & Todesco (1978) to Griffiths (2008; 2013).
The basic premise is that, if we can spot learners who do well at L2 learning, and identify the
strategies that they use, then we will be able to pass on that information to ‘less good’ language
learners in the hope that they will modify their strategic behaviour.

The second historical point of departure came from Canale and Swain (1980) in their description of
L2 communicative competence—that is, the components that we should be expecting L2 learners to
show their ability in. In their model, alongside grammatical competence and sociolinguistic
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competence, an L2 learner was expected to show ‘strategic competence’, an ability to compensate for
relatively limited linguistic knowledge in language use situations. Strategic competence was attributed
additional importance by Bachman and Palmer (1996) in their model of language competence.
With regard to strategies research and theorizing, the historical timeline in the educational research
field, by contrast, is not so easy to trace. This is because it is intertwined with the use of the concept of
strategies in cognitive psychology (Kail & Bisanz, 1982; Rabinowitz & Chi, 1987) and in L1 reading
research. However, it is strongly associated with the work of Alexander (Alexander & Judy, 1988;
Alexander, Graham, & Harris, 1998), who, along with her associates, describes strategies as being
‘purposeful’, ‘effortful’, ‘facilitative’, and ‘essential’ (Alexander et al., 1998, p. 130). They are
purposeful in that they have an educational learning goal driving their use. They are effortful in that
they require substantial mental resources to be expended, and they are essential and facilitative in that
without them, academic achievement is unlikely to occur. Strategies, in the psychology and
educational literature, are classified as conscious mental activity. Rabinowitz and Chi (1987) proposed
that mental processes that are enacted without awareness cannot be classified as strategic.
The educational field has, at times, appeared to distance itself from the concept of learner strategies,
preferring to adopt a broader concept of self-regulation (Pintrich & García, 1991; Zimmerman, 1990).
Self-regulation has also been adopted as a preferred model by some applied linguists (for example,
Tseng, Dörnyei, & Schmitt, 2006), who have in fact proposed that research in language learner
strategies should be abandoned because of its lack of theoretical rigour, a position that has met with a
number of ripostes (Gao, 2007; Grenfell & Macaro, 2007; Rose, 2011).
Early descriptions of learner strategies in the SLA field tended to focus on general or observable
behaviours (Rubin, 1975):
1attempting to guess or infer previously unknown language
2demonstrating a strong desire to communicate
3not being inhibited about communicating in the L2; being willing to make
mistakes
4being prepared to attend to both form and meaning
5monitoring one’s performance as a regular feature of language learning.

Later taxonomies became less general, while not necessarily associating individual strategies with
specific tasks. Probably the best known of these is Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language
Learning (the SILL). My own contribution to learner strategies theory development has been made in
a series of publications (Macaro, 2001b; 2006; 2007; 2009; 2010; Macaro, Graham, & Vanderplank,
2007), particularly in Macaro (2006). As this theorizing has been based on a model that I have tried to
adhere to and test since that date, I will spend a little time explaining it here.
The model recognizes some inherent problems in the notion of the GLL. For example, in most
cases where the researcher has utilized the GLL label, we do not know the direction of causality: does
the observed evidence that an individual is proficient in a language result from the individual’s
strategic behaviour or are they now in a position to deploy a particular set of learner strategies only
because they have reached a certain level of proficiency? Furthermore, unless we know the GLL’s
background and learning trajectory, we do not know what life chances may have facilitated his or her
being described as a GLL. This has been seen to be of particular relevance to EMI in other parts of
this book, which have compared private and public education, rural and urban learning contexts, and

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high-income and low-income countries. It may be the case, therefore, that some GLLs are not born but
made by their circumstances.
This problem of the direction of causality is as pertinent to the EMI learner as it is to the EFL
learner—perhaps more so. Is a 16-year-old in an EMI Geography class more successful than his or her
peers at understanding what the teacher is saying in English because of strategic behaviour? Or does
the student’s level of English proficiency give access to a range of strategies that are restricted or
denied to someone with a lower level of proficiency? Of course, it is perfectly possible that both
explanations are the case. However, as I have argued in the past, it is of the greatest importance in
research that we adopt a methodology that unpacks these causal directions.
Another problem that the Macaro (2006) model identifies is related to the concept of proficiency.
The model accepts the theoretical strength of Canale and Swain’s (1980) proposal mentioned above
and builds on it. If a component of communicative competence is the ability to compensate for limited
linguistic resources (relative to a native or near-native speaker), then in a test of proficiency, that
component will be activated. Thus, an individual’s demonstration of proficiency, as operationalized
though a test of proficiency such as IELTS, must include both their linguistic resources and their
strategic behaviour that compensates for limitations in the resources. Logically, therefore, proficiency
cannot be correlated with strategic behaviour because it already consists of strategic behaviour. So in
order to understand what is going on in a learner’s performance, we must consider what his or her
linguistic resources are. I have suggested that the most important of these NOTE 1, in most
language use settings (including EMI), are measures of vocabulary and morphosyntactic knowledge
(henceforth ‘linguistic knowledge’).

Linguistic knowledge and prior knowledge of the topic

Let us, therefore, apply the above to an EMI task such as listening to the teacher in a Geography
lesson. An individual will have at his or her disposal, at any one moment in time, a fixed level of
linguistic knowledge (vocabulary and grammar knowledge cannot vary hugely from one moment to
the next). The learner, therefore, has to deploy that linguistic knowledge strategically to get the most
out of what the teacher is saying. Almost certainly, the indispensable aspect of that strategic behaviour
will be how the learner uses prior knowledge of the topic. There is a large body of SLA literature on
how prior knowledge of the topic affects comprehension (for a summary, see Macaro, Graham, &
Vanderplank, 2007; Macaro, Vanderplank, & Graham, 2005). It is much less explored in contexts
where subject content is the primary educational objective. Moreover, where strategic behaviour has
been explored in Immersion contexts, the tendency has been to conceive it primarily as a language-
related student effort (as in the 2002 study by Carson and Longhini, who used the SILL in their
longitudinal analysis of learning styles), rather than an integrated language and content one.
Let us consider whether prior knowledge of the topic is likely to be more important (i.e. whether it
explains a higher percentage of the variance) in EFL or EMI. Undoubtedly, the effect of prior
knowledge of the topic on comprehension in EFL will be related to the level it is being applied to. At
‘beginner level’, the topics are based on commonly shared knowledge (‘Listen to this description of a
bedroom … How big is it? … What is in the bedroom?’), and therefore the level of topic knowledge is
unlikely to affect comprehension. With intermediate- and advanced-level topics, prior knowledge of a
topic is not typically shared to the same degree. This is well demonstrated by Markham and Latham’s
(1987) study of comprehension of a text describing different prayer rituals, and in Long’s (1990)

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study of comprehension texts, one about the Ecuadorian gold rush and one about the rock band U2.
Both studies found that different levels of prior knowledge of a topic had an impact on listening
comprehension.
So we can say that, in general, EFL texts selected by teachers for comprehension are ‘graded’ in
terms of the impact prior knowledge of the topic is likely to have. This is important because as an EFL
student’s linguistic knowledge increases, he or she should be able to cope with more unknown topic
information in a text. This hypothesis is inherent in Stanovich’s (1980) interactive and compensatory
model of comprehension, where contextual knowledge (both ‘world knowledge’ and co-text
knowledge—that which has been understood thus far) plays a key role in understanding a text. When
our linguistic knowledge is lacking, we find it difficult to activate bottom-up processing
(understanding words and short phrases) and therefore try to infer their meaning from our prior
knowledge and contextual knowledge (top-down processing). When our contextual knowledge is
lacking, we try to focus on individual words and short phrases in the hope of assembling a level of
meaning.
The following is an example that speaks to both EFL and EMI. If a person is reading a newspaper
article on current politics in a specific country, written in a language for which they have good
linguistic knowledge, they will certainly struggle to understand if they know little or nothing about the
particular political issues of that country being discussed, even though they might work very hard to
try to piece together what is being said by looking at the individual words. If an EMI student of
politics with equal linguistic knowledge to that reader reads the newspaper article, that student will
have a body of prior knowledge about how politics works (for example, the knowledge and
understanding of how constitutions impact on political activity), which may lead to a better
understanding of the article than the non-student of politics. The EMI student may not have the ‘local
topic knowledge’, but he or she will have greater and more in-depth ‘global topic knowledge’.
However, politics is a subject that has much more of a shared understanding among humans than,
say, particle physics, where the gap between the expert and non-expert is wider. If we superimpose the
above scenario on a research paper about particle physics, prior knowledge of the topic and the
different levels of that prior knowledge would have a huge impact on comprehension, compensating
for deficiencies in linguistic knowledge. (I am putting aside for the moment the issue of different
vocabulary types, which will be discussed below.)
Is the expectation of students’ prior knowledge ‘graded’ by the EMI teacher? On the one hand, we
could say ‘yes it is’, and even more so than in EFL. Particularly in pre-tertiary education, the
‘grading’ is operationalized through a stated curriculum, which (one would hope) describes a
progression of knowledge and understanding concomitant with the intellectual development of the
students. In HE, the curriculum is, I hypothesize, specified much less in terms of progression of
difficulty and more in terms of thematic content. Not being an expert in curriculum studies in HE, I
can only say this very tentatively, but the impression one gets (and it certainly is the case in Applied
Linguistics curricula that I am familiar with) is that the curriculum is thematic rather than
developmental. In all phases of education, however, good teachers will consider the level of the task
they are proposing to the students, and the speed and operational difficulty of the task against their
prior knowledge of the topic. In the EMI classroom, additionally, a good teacher will consider the
students’ linguistic knowledge.
So far, we have considered the respective roles of linguistic knowledge and prior knowledge of the
topic. But what of the students themselves? What strategic behaviour will students deploy in order to
maximize their potential for comprehension and learning, given their ‘current’ linguistic
knowledge and prior knowledge? As space is limited, I will focus mainly on two subsets of research
evidence: listening comprehension and vocabulary. To do this, we have to unpack the final component
of the learner strategy model I have been attempting to provide an exposition of: that of the nature of
‘a strategy’ itself.

Strategic behaviour
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To be brief, in much of the literature, as mentioned above, strategies have been described in both very
narrow terms (‘I try to visualize in my mind’s eye a word I have just heard that I don’t recognize’) and
very broad terms (‘I take notes when listening to a lecture’). In the model I have proposed, I find this
inclusive approach theoretically unsound. Visualizing is a strategy that is cognitively definable. It
occurs in a component of working memory known as the visual–spatial sketchpad (Baddeley, 1997)
and is only temporary, as working memory can only hold an internal image for a very short period of
time. Visualizing is a cognitive strategy that is available to the vast majority of humans. Taking notes
in a lecture is neither brief nor a cognitive strategy, nor is it necessarily readily available to all
humans. Note-taking is an activity that is observable externally to its user; a motor activity, not a
cognitive activity. Now, students taking notes may use some cognitive actions (including visualization
of a word a teacher has just uttered) or they may not. They may use a whole series of cognitive actions
during the activity that we have come to label ‘note-taking’. Most importantly, one student may use a
set of cognitive actions and another may use some of these but not all, and the latter student may
choose to use others which the first student has not used.
Thus, students carrying out a listening task use clusters of strategies, which they select from a
repertoire that they have accumulated over time (psychologists would say from a very early age).
Different students will use different clusters: some by choice, others because those strategies are
restricted by factors such as low linguistic knowledge (Clarke, 1980); some will deploy their selection
of strategies in combinations according to task-type, others in fixed ‘chains of strategies’ (Macaro,
2014).
Following Briggs (2015) and Fung (2016), I have adopted the term ‘opportunities for strategic
behaviour’ for activities such as ‘note-taking’, ‘looking up words in a dictionary’, or ‘asking a fellow
student for help’. These opportunities may include clusters of cognitive strategies. They may also
include metacognitive strategies that evaluate the effectiveness of the selection of cognitive strategies.
Opportunities for strategic behaviour can present themselves in classrooms, at home through
computer-mediated communication, and face-to-face outside the home, whether in a minority or
majority context (i.e. EMI or study abroad in an anglophone country).
I can now summarize the above discussion in an extended definition of learner strategies as follows:
Strategies are the conscious, goal-oriented, mental actions that learners deploy, often in clusters,
in relation to a language use or a language learning task. These clusters of mental actions may
need to be adapted as and when different task-types are encountered by the student. The strategic
behaviour adopted will have varying degrees of intensity according to the difficulty of the task
and relative to a learner’s linguistic knowledge. Contributing to the level of difficulty of the task
is the learner’s knowledge of the topic.
Since the above definition includes the term ‘language use task’, there is no need to differentiate it for
EFL and EMI. An EMI classroom provides the archetypal setting for ‘language use’. Figure 9.1
illustrates much of the theoretical discussion that has gone on so far and in the definition given above.

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Figure 9.1 Learner strategies in an EMI listening context

Let us look now in a little more detail at the clusters of strategies themselves—first, as they are
applied to listening comprehension.

Listening comprehension in EMI settings

SLA research on learner strategies in listening has almost invariably focused on recorded language,
what might be called ‘unidirectional listening’. With this kind of listening, students have no control
over the speech stream (unless they are operating the device themselves), nor can they interrupt to
question the speaker and negotiate meaning. An exception to this is Vandergrift’s (1997) article, in
which learners were reported as having asked questions of the person they were listening to when
experiencing comprehension problems, questions that differed according to their level of proficiency.
Goh (2000) usefully provides the following difficulties that EFL learners encounter in unidirectional
listening:
1not recognizing words they actually know
2quickly forgetting what they have just heard
3understanding words but not the intended message
4neglecting the next part of a text when thinking about the meaning of an earlier part.

In order to try to overcome these difficulties, learners use listening strategies. The following are some
of the strategies that have been reported in the unidirectional listening literature, compiled from
Graham & Macaro (2008), Goh (2002), Vandergrift (2003), Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal, &
Tafaghodtari (2006):
1advanced planning (i.e. planning to listen)
making predictions about the likely content of a passage
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2 3focusing on sound patterns and intonation

4repeating words in one’s head
5decoding individual words
6 selectively attending to certain aspects of the passage
7 into the L1 words or phrases that one hears
translating
8 to ‘listen out for’ particular words or phrases or idea units
deciding
9
elaborating in one’s head what one has heard
10guessing from the immediate context
11guessing from one’s knowledge of the world (the broader context)
12evaluating one’s progress in understanding a passage
As we can see from the above, virtually all of these SLA strategies
could be applied to listening to content information in the EMI classroom. However, two main
differences can be observed:
1In the SLA literature, the strategies have been documented in relation to listening to a
recorded text. In the EMI classroom, students tend to listen mostly to the teacher.
2Prior knowledge operates differently in the two educational settings (EFL and EMI), a
point raised earlier.

Let us explore these two fundamental differences further.

Listening to the teacher: comparing EFL and EMI settings

Apart from the context of listening to lectures (which could be unidirectional) it is only very recently
that ‘listening to the teacher’ has been considered worthy of strategy research. This is very surprising,
given how much teacher talk there is, as we have seen in Chapter 7. A study of strategic behaviour in
Hong Kong secondary schools, with regard to the strategies that students reported using when
listening to the teacher was carried out by Fung (2016). As little or no previous research was available
on ‘listening to the teacher strategies’, Fung developed his own questionnaire using a ‘grounded
approach’ (starting with interviews and open-ended questions). Although these were EFL classrooms,
the strategies reported can easily be applied to EMI classrooms and, in fact, Fung mentions that on
occasion the teachers were using content-type material. He found that the students reported the
following strategies and ‘opportunities for strategy use’ the most:
1identifying the general meaning of the teacher’s talk
2integrating what they understood of the teacher’s talk with their prior knowledge
3focusing attention on words emphasized by the teacher
4asking classmates what the teacher meant
5observing what classmates did to understand the teacher’s talk.
(Fung, 2016, p. 321–324)
They used the following strategies and ‘opportunities’ the least:
1writing down what the teacher said
2asking the teacher to repeat
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3anticipating the key vocabulary of the topic of a particular lesson

4asking the teacher what he or she meant.
(Fung, 2016, p. 321–324)
We can see in the above a clear divergence from the strategies reported in the ‘unidirectional’
listening literature, in that they more frequently involve the actions of another human being (teacher
or peers). Other strategies that students reported having used demonstrate that ‘listening to the
teacher’ involves making use of what has already been learnt in previous lessons or learning settings’,
another key difference from the SLA listening strategies literature:
1recalling what they have read in preparation for the lesson
2anticipating the key vocabulary of the topic of a lesson
3attempting to guess the intention of the teacher when he or she is saying something
4reminding themselves of the teacher’s usual way of saying things.

In EMI programmes, even if the teacher asks students to watch videos (for example, in a Science
lesson), these videos will be mediated by the teacher’s interjections and explanations, as the listening
/viewing is not being used to assess how much language the students have understood in the same
way that recordings are used in EFL classrooms. In EMI, a learner’s strategic listening behaviour may
well depend more on the teacher’s teaching techniques or style.
When multiple teachers are involved in the teaching of a discipline (as happens more in HE),
students may need to adapt their strategies to the different teaching techniques or styles, as it were,
‘within-subject’. The fact that a variety of teaching styles are being encountered in HE within-subject
means that problems of transition from secondary to tertiary may include learners having to re-orient
themselves to this additional change in the form of curriculum delivery and, by implication, adapt
their strategic behaviour.
Of course, we could also propose that, in secondary schools, students will have been exposed to
different teaching approaches: different subjects taught by a variety of teachers. So some adaptation of
strategic behaviour from classroom to classroom may have already occurred. Nevertheless, the
transition from secondary to tertiary may well require a strategic realignment, not only to the teaching
styles and diversity of the teachers, but also to an increasingly specialized field of subject content.
Future research would do well to try to identify, with regard to learner strategies, ‘vertical’ transition
problems and ‘horizontal’ multidisciplinary and multi-teacher challenges.
If listening to the teacher is different from listening to a recording, in terms of strategic behaviour,
what about prior knowledge of the topic? Subject specialist teachers are attempting to put across a
coherent exposition of a concept. Often they do this by way of a structure that may begin with the title
of the topic (‘Today we are going to talk about …’) followed by a brief description of what the topic
will entail, before diverging into various forms of exemplification followed, in turn, by a summary.
The part that prior knowledge plays in this structure is very different from the part it plays in listening
to an EFL text, where the related task structure is likely to be: listen to an introduction to the topic
area, listen to the text, show what have you understood. The purpose of listening in an EMI setting is
therefore less clearly defined than in an EFL setting. Similarly, the expectations in the former setting
are less frequently articulated.
In research terms, I have not come across any studies that have asked the students questions such as:
When you are listening to your teacher in your Biology lesson, do you spend more time
thinking about the Biology or about the English—that is, the language that the teacher is
using?
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What are the listening strategies that you use in your Biology lesson?

It is possible that in settings where the aims of the EMI programme are not articulated for the students,
it will be up to them to make a decision as to the language learning goals they want to set themselves,
where to focus their efforts, how much effort to exert, and the kinds of strategic behaviours to adopt in
order to achieve those goals through that level of effort.
So, what research into listening of any kind has been carried out in the EMI context that might
inform learner strategies research? To some extent, we have already considered aspects of this in
Chapter 7, where we looked at the teacher’s speech rate and the use of ‘we’, as well as the study by
Senina (2012), also mentioned in Chapter 7. More interest in this area has been shown in the HE
phase than the secondary phase. For example, how lecturers marked ‘importance’ in their
presentations was investigated by Deroey (2015), who identified a possible classification: those
discourse markers that seem to refer to the subject in hand (‘A fundamental point about XX is that
…’; ‘The important point about this is …’); those that address the students (‘Remember that …’; ‘You
should remember …’; ‘These are the take-home points’); and those that refer to the speaker (‘I should
stress that …’). Deroey confirms that ‘markers typically occur before the highlighted point’ (p. 51).
However, the purpose of her study was not to investigate how this affected the students in the class, as
would be of interest to this chapter. The questions we would need to ask would be (1) Are these
different ‘signals of importance’ sufficiently salient to be noticed by the students? (2) If they are
noticed, in what ways do the students use them strategically?
It may be that the frequency of these importance markers means they go by unnoticed or are not
considered of sufficient importance to be taken seriously. Let us take one marker that might seem
quite salient in the speech stream of the teacher: ‘These are the take-home points’. This signals a good
opportunity for strategic behaviour to occur: one student will stop making notes as the lecture
progresses and start bulleting down the ‘take-home points’ on a laptop, beginning to commit them to
memory. Another student may underline notes already taken, those which relate to the ‘take-home
points’, and may make a mental note to recall them, in his or her own words, some time later. A third
student may simply go on sending text messages about the evening’s entertainment…
Students thus vary with regard to the strategies they adopt when the opportunities arise. It would be
very useful to do a number of follow-up studies to that of Deroey. As Deroey’s study is centred on the
British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus, one where the majority of the teachers are native
speakers, it would be useful to undertake one using the ELFA corpus (see Chapter 5) to see what
variation there might be. Secondly, it may be enlightening to document these features of teacher talk
in the secondary classroom to compare the frequency and types of markers used with those used in the
tertiary classroom. Lastly, and most importantly for the purpose of this chapter, it would seem
opportune to focus on the learner, and to investigate students’ strategies in relation to these and other
features of EMI teacher talk.
A more strategy-orientated study of the contexts of lectures was carried out by King (1992).
Although the target population was not EMI students but college students who were struggling with
their English, it is worth describing here because of its theme. The students in the sample were
randomly assigned to three groups, then trained to use different strategies when listening to lectures:
self-questioning, summarizing and notetaking-review. According to the author, self-questioning
consists of students asking themselves questions about what they have heard or are in the process of
hearing: ‘What is the main idea of …?’, ‘How does it relate to …?’, ‘What conclusions can I draw
about …?’ (p. 305). Summarizing is concerned with using one’s own words to condense what one has
heard. Notetaking-review involves taking notes and then reviewing them at a later date. A pre-
treatment questionnaire found no significant differences between the three groups of students using
these ‘opportunities for strategic behaviour’ (King refers to them simply as ‘strategies’). She found
that the self-questioning group and summarizing groups outperformed the notetaking-review group in
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lecture comprehension after the treatment. No differences were found between the self-questioning
group and the summarizing groups. This would suggest that activating high levels of one’s cognitive
behaviour is necessary in lecture comprehension, and particularly at the time of the lecture, rather than
leaving it till later.
Some research on learning from the students’ perspective has been carried out with reference to
reading comprehension in the broader field of content teaching, and we could consider these studies
briefly here because of the affinity between reading and listening. For example, Neufeld (2005)
provides a practitioner guide to reading comprehension strategies. As in EFL, EMI learners might ask
themselves what the text is broadly about, what the key topics or points being made are, how it is
organized, and what processes are involved. He also recommends strategies such as predicting what is
going to be in the text, or come up later in the text. However, what is different from EFL is that he
touches on the same issues I have alluded to above: ‘Why am I reading this text? (for example, to
prepare for a class discussion, to write a report about this topic, to review before a test, for enjoyment)
and also: ‘What do I already know about this topic?’ (p. 304). latter last question, I would propose,
would be asked in a much more explicit way in an EMI context than in an EFL context. Ness (2009)
also looked at reading comprehension strategies in secondary content classrooms, but from the
perspective of whether teachers actively and explicitly taught comprehension strategies. She found
that only 3% of instructional time appeared to be devoted to this kind of strategy training activity.
Returning to listening comprehension specifically, Lessard-Clouston (2010) carried out a case study
of the use of technical vocabulary in lectures with Theology undergraduate students. The author starts
from the premise that there is a general belief that technical vocabulary contained in lectures is a
major challenge for students in trying to understand lecture content, particularly because different
words have different meanings or are used in different ways across content subjects. Lessard-Clouston
was interested in finding out the distribution of general non-academic vocabulary as in the General
Service List (West, 1953), academic vocabulary as in the University Word List (Xue & Nation, 1984),
and technical or specialized vocabulary, the discipline in question being Theology. After having
transcribed a relatively large sample of lectures, he found that 87.2% of word tokens were GSL
(64.1% different word typesNOTE 2). Only 4.9% of tokens were classified as academic English
(UWL), but, noticeably, this represented 13.8% of word types. Put differently, there may not have
been much academic vocabulary, but this was repeated over and over again. The theology vocabulary
amounted to 2.7% of tokens and about 3.4% of word types. The conclusion, therefore, must be that, in
terms of quantity, the greatest challenge for EMI students is not the technical vocabulary contained in
teacher talk but the more general academic words and, indeed, the general vocabulary of everyday
conversations. This leads us to a discussion that is more focused on vocabulary knowledge itself.

Listening comprehension and vocabulary knowledge

For the EMI student, it will be important to be able to differentiate between the varieties of lexical
categories contained in the teacher’s speech stream in order to then apply strategies for acquiring that
vocabulary. Moreover, it may be even more important to be able to make mental connections
between the technical vocabulary and the other types of vocabulary being used in order to arrive at an
understanding of how the technical terms are related to the concept that is being explained and how
this, in turn, is related to the less specialized lexis that is being used to explain the concept through
definitions, paraphrasing, and exemplification. This relationship is illustrated in Figure 9.2. It is
interesting that Vidal (2003, p. 81) found that students were actually better at learning technical terms
than they were at learning more general academic vocabulary.

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Figure 9.2 Relationship between technical terms and concepts

Research in SLA strategies has demonstrated the critical role played by metacognition (Vandergrift
et al., 2006). In order to deploy effective strategies, students need to develop high levels of self-
questioning about their learning process and self-evaluation about their progress. There is no apparent
reason to suppose that self-questioning and self-evaluation cannot be applied to an EMI setting, where
students could ask themselves the following questions:
When I listen to the teacher. can I …
1recognize the way the teacher organizes ideas (the structure of what is being
presented)?
2see the relationship between what the teacher says and what is presented on the
slides?
3see the relationship between what the teacher says and what I read on the handouts?
4distinguish facts being presented from the teacher’s opinion, judgment, or evaluation?
5understand the questions asked by my fellow students?
6 understand procedural instructions the teacher gives us (for example, to carry out a task in
groups)?
7 understand the technical words the teacher uses?
8 understand the general academic words and phrases the teacher uses (for example,
‘nevertheless’, ‘presupposes’, ‘in order to’)?
9 understand the everyday vocabulary and phrases the teacher uses (for example, ‘You’re
going to find this easy’)?
10understand the idiomatic language the teacher uses (for example, ‘If you get this
right, I’ll be over the moon!’)?

Students could also consider whether they:

1ask questions about content (because the teacher encourages it)
2ask questions about content (even though the teacher does not encourage it)
3ask questions about language (whether the teacher encourages it or not).

In the above list, we can see the interrelationship between listening comprehension and vocabulary
knowledge. A study investigating this relationship is currently being carried out in two Turkish
universities by Sukru Nural and myself. I am able to report some early findings here. We aimed to
find out the following: after listening to EMI lectures, what words do students cite as being

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memorable from the lecture and why; what difficulties do they report experiencing in relation to
vocabulary in their disciplines; and what strategies do they use in order to overcome difficulties in
vocabulary learning? The sample was made up of 161 students studying either International Relations
or Philosophy. Data was collected using a student open-ended questionnaire administered
immediately after each lecture. We then coded the questionnaire responses according to four broad
categories: the characteristics of the word, the lecture topic, the lecturer’s delivery, and learner
characteristics. For the purposes of the current discussion, I will focus only on the first of these. In
terms of a word’s characteristics as being the reasons for recalling it at the end of the lecture, we
found that students (unsurprisingly) said it had to do with how frequently the word occurred in the
teacher’s speech or because of an item’s centrality to the theme of the lecture. So, for example, the
word ‘occasionalism’ occurred in a Philosophy lecture and this was recalled because the main topic of
the lecture was precisely around the concept of occasionalism. However, they also made references to
the ‘strength’ of the word or even just how much they liked it (for example, the word ‘rapprochement’
in an International Relations lecture). Some students appeared to be making a personal judgment
about whether a word they remembered was actually a key word or represented a key concept in the
lecture. Of course, whether this personal judgment proved to be correct could only be ascertained with
additional research data. Students most often expressed their difficulties in learning words in terms of
their having many different meanings, which frequently appeared in day-to-day conversations and in
their studies. They also considered some words difficult to pronounce, or they referred to the form of
the word, its spelling, and whether the word originated from French, Arabic, or German. The
strategies they used for learning the words they had heard in the lecture were:
1translation into L1
2memorizing the first and last letters of words
3thinking of synonyms and antonyms
4trying to make up a story connected to the word
5putting the word into different sentences
6 repeating the words in their head after the lecture.

The students also described how they created ‘opportunities for strategic behaviour’ by:
1reading texts and textbooks that included the words in order to understand the concept
linked to the word
2watching the Discovery Channel
3using dictionaries, including online dictionaries (for example, TurengNOTE 3) and

Google.

The above list of word comprehension and word acquisition strategies in EMI is very similar to the
list of strategies reported in SLA. There is now a comprehensive body of SLA research on the
strategies used by learners in L2 learning contexts (i.e. not Immersion or EMI) to comprehend and
learn new vocabulary (for an introduction, see Nyikos & Fan, 2007). Though by no means
exhaustive, the following list of vocabulary strategies is taken from a number of sources published in
the field of SLA (Gu & Johnson, 1996; Lawson & Hobden, 1996; Macaro, 2001b; Sanaoui, 1995; Van
Hell & Candia Mahn, 1997).

Strategies for vocabulary comprehension:

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1trying to guess the word from its component parts

2establishing whether it is a cognate of an L1 word
3considering a word just looked up in a dictionary or glossary
4trying to guess the meaning of a word from its co-text
5trying to guess the meaning of a word from the overall context (the topic)
6 trying to link a word to something that has occurred earlier in the text.

Strategies for vocabulary acquisition:

1noticing a part of a word: for example, the suffix

2noticing the (unusual) meaning of a word
3noticing the (unusual) position of a word or its presence in and contribution to a
collocation
4repeating the word out loud or under one’s breath
5repeating the word silently in one’s head
6 repeated copying and looking
7 writing lists with the L1 equivalents, or with definitions
8 organized list writing (for example, by gender or by word class)
9 writing word cards (with the L1 equivalent on the back)
10writing the first l_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ of a w_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ (the first letter of a word)

11linking the word to a graphic image

12making use of linguistic associations such as mnemonics and the keyword
technique
13writing the word down as part of a sentence or a dialogue
14writing the word down on a piece of paper and placing it somewhere (for
example, sticking it to bathroom mirror) in order to make the link between the word and
the object in some way
15recording the words and then listening and repeating
16using the look, hide, say, write, check technique
17connecting the word with a personal event
18using imagery (connecting the word to a visual image in the mind).

How, then, can we explain why students learning Philosophy and International Relations, in the above
pilot study by Nural and Macaro, did not report using as many of the comprehension or acquisition
strategies reported by learners in classrooms where the L2 is the object of study? Is it the case that
strategic behaviour, in relation to vocabulary, is basically the same whether it is being deployed in an
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EFL or an EMI situation, in which case these students were simply not using many strategic skills? Or
is it that EMI is very different from EFL and somehow requires a narrower range of strategies? Let us
consider in greater depth what sort of vocabulary EMI learners encounter.
Most researchers of the vocabulary used in academic contexts observe that it broadly falls into three
categories: general everyday vocabulary, general academic vocabulary, and technical vocabulary. Let
us begin with the last of these. According to Hung and Nation (2004), technical vocabulary is subject-
related and therefore part of a system of knowledge held by specialists in that field. They argue that it
is necessary to be able to reliably identify technical vocabulary because this ‘provides an essential
starting point for looking at how learners and teachers should deal with technical vocabulary’ (p. 251).
The authors tested a number of ways of identifying technical vocabulary and found that using a rating
scale was the most reliable but also the most time-consuming. Two raters were asked to place a very
large corpus of words on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 indicated that the word had no particular
relationship to a subject discipline (they used Anatomy in their study) through to 4, where words
would be considered as having a meaning specific to one subject discipline and no other. One rater
was an anatomy specialist (a trained nurse); the other was not. They achieved a high level of
agreement (95%) on the rating scale.
As part of the project in Turkey, Sukru Nural and I also experimented with a rating scale. We asked
native speakers of British English (residing in the UK), all with university education backgrounds, to
place a number of words taken from Philosophy and International Relations lectures on a not-too-
dissimilar scale to the one used by Hung and Nation (2004), of which some of the words are presented
in Figure 9.3. Here, we asked the raters to tick one box only; in other words, not allowing them
to say ‘well, it’s both technical and everyday talk’.

Figure 9.3 Survey instrument for different vocabulary types

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Our early analysis of this exploratory work suggests that, in fact, there is very little consensus
among non-specialists with regard to words such as these. Put differently, if non-specialists encounter
certain words which to them appear to have not only polysemous qualities but are also used in
different discipline domains, they do not find allocating the word to the most central domain an easy
thing to do. It is not surprising that our Turkish student respondents above cited the challenge of
words with multiple meanings (see Halliday, 1993, for a full description and discussion of this issue).
A much-cited and often-used corpus of academic words is the Academic Word List (AWL),
devised by Coxhead (2000). A more specialized, medical word list is provided by Wang, Liang, and
Ge (2008) and a list of engineering technical words by Ward (2009). Simpson-Vlach and Ellis (2010),
have compiled an Academic Formulas List (AFL), which is a list of formulaic language (or multi-
word lexical units) used in academic speech and writing. For both general academic and specialized
technical language, we need more strategy research to understand the challenges that EMI students
face. As Coxhead (2013, p. 127) argues, ‘everyday words with specialized meanings could present
some difficulties for teachers as learners struggle to learn new meanings and concepts for words that
are already established in their lexicon’. The ten words below were selected (somewhat randomly by
the current author) from the AWL. The number immediately following the word represents (according
to the AWL) its frequency, with 1 denoting the highest frequency and 10 the lowest. I have then
identified the word class and the number of different meanings with the help of the New Oxford
Dictionary of English (1998 edition):

contract = 1; noun and verb; four meanings

administrate = 2; verb (less common verb for ‘administer’); two meanings
alternative = 3; adjective and noun; single meaning
contrast = 4; noun and verb; single meaning
compound = 5; noun, adjective, verb; four meanings
estate = 6; noun; four meanings
infer = 7; verb; one meaning
minimize = 8; verb; one meaning
preliminary = 9; adjective and noun; one meaning
undergo = 10; verb; one meaning

As can be seen, the situation presented to the EMI student is quite complicated with regard to the
kinds of words and the level of word-depth they are expected to understand and possibly learn for
subsequent use. Moreover, students are expected, by virtue of the academic community they are
entering, to have a sense of how central the word is to their discipline, and whether they can use it in a
different context to the discipline in which they encountered it. Chan (2015) describes the challenges
faced by EMI learners of Mathematics in Hong Kong secondary schools. He argues convincingly that,
when learning Maths through EMI, learners are usually unable to ‘activate their schemata and
everyday life experience’ (p. 308) in order to make sense of the mathematical terms. Moreover the
genre of Mathematics means that technical terms often appear in highly condensed sentences and with
processes which would normally be described using action verbs being presented as nouns
(‘nominalization’). He gives the example of how ‘to factor’ can change to ‘factorise’ and then to
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‘factorisation’ (p. 308), or from an adjective (applicable) to a noun (applicability). An additional

challenge for EMI students is that different verbs are used interchangeably in Mathematics (add,
combine,increase). While, of course, these technical terms and the mathematical genre would present
L1 MOI students and their teachers with a number of difficulties, these are multiplied (if the reader
will excuse the pun) when both learners and teachers are operating through an L2. Chan also identifies
problems at the clause and discourse level. Space does not allow me to illustrate these here but,
nonetheless, we can imagine the kind of discourse that would be used in order to describe the
formulae in Figure 9.4.

Figure 9.4 A mathematical formulaNOTE 4

Equally, students may experience problems in attempting to differentiate between the following
because of the function that the prepositions (or their absence) play in each sentence:
The dress has been reduced by £15.
The dress has been reduced to £15.
The dress has been reduced from £15.
The dress has been reduced £15.

So, Mathematics has two codes: one is a highly specialized set of formulas made up of symbols, and
the other a set of technical terms used to describe those formulas, which in turn look like words used
in other genres of language (see also Chapter 8). Similar linguistic challenges are faced by students in
Science Subjects. Kong and Hoare (2012) describe how academic language proficiency needs to
develop for secondary Science students to successfully understand and internalize the language of
science. They list nominalizations and grammatical metaphors, complex noun phrases, language of
knowledge relationships, and lexical density as challenges facing students learning Science through
L2 English. It is in nominalization and grammatical metaphors where, in particular, the additional
challenge for EMI resides. Not only are learners faced with concrete actions being turned into abstract
concepts, or the products of processes (which they would face were the science being taught in L1),
but also with the morphosyntactic challenges of nominalization and grammatical metaphors being
presented in a language whose structures they have not yet mastered.
Other challenges have to do with the nature of the lexis itself. Figure 9.5 is an extract from a
section of teacher talk in a secondary school Chemistry lesson, which I have classified as technical
terms, general academic vocabulary, and ‘everyday talk’ or ‘vernacular’:

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Vocabulary-type classification:

technical science terms (italics)

GENERAL ACADEMIC VOCABULARY (upper case)
everyday talk or vernacular (lower case)

Teacher: So standard hydrogen electrode – that’s FACTUAL RECALL, okay, that’s not going to be massively
challenging, just some stuff you will have to have to commit to memory. DESCRIBE how two electrodes can
be used to make an electrochemical cell–it’s going to involve us explaining the changes going on at the
different electrodes there. Remember two electrodes, or sometimes called two half cells, are going to make a
cell in today’s lesson, and then standard notation and CALCULATING voltage will be also sort of fairly
challenging for us, okay? Now, what we need to understand about what an electrode really is, okay … you’
re probably thinking an electrode is like a little bit of metal that you stick in something or a bit of carbon that
you stick in something … what we now need to do is to get into our head that a simple electrode is … an
EQUILIBRIUM between a piece of zinc … for example, in a SOLUTION of zinc sulphate, and when we do
that, when we put that chunk of zinc into the zinc sulphate you end up with an EQUILIBRIUM, and that’s the
EQUILIBRIUM that we saw earlier, okay? So some of the zinc atoms lose a couple of electrons and turn into
zinc ions … which DISSOLVE. Now, the zinc ions are perfectly happy swimming around in the zinc sulphate
SOLUTION, but the electrons can’t exist in a SOLUTION – electrons can only exist in a conductor, like the
metal that’s left.

Figure 9.5 Different vocabulary types in teacher talk

What we notice from Figure 9.5 is that the total number of tokens of technical terms that are
science-specific (for example,electrochemical cell, zinc atoms) are few in number, and the number of
tokens that might be classified as chemistry-specific are even fewer (zinc sulphate). What we also
notice is that the number of types (different words) are even more reduced, in that words such as
electrode and electron appear repeatedly. However, even though they are repeated, they represent
different concepts, not different members of a word family, such as ‘cover, discover, discovered,
undiscovered’. Thus, for students encountering these words, an application of a ‘word-family’
comprehension strategy might lead them completely in the wrong direction. A 16-year-old L1 native
speaker of English would be unlikely to think that electrode is a verb related to the noun electron (‘the
electron electroded’) because of the multiple exposures that he or she will have had to morphological
patterns of English. However, this may not be the case for a 16-year-old L1 speaker of Arabic who
has had much less exposure to those morphological patterns, and who may see the word electrode in
isolation and conceive it as a verb.
Notice, also, from the extract in Figure 9.5 that there are many tokens that I have classified as
general academic vocabulary, but which arguably could be classified as technical across a number of
other disciplines (for example, equilibrium in Science, Politics, and History). The word solution can
be used in Chemistry as in this extract (a chemical solution), but also with different meanings for
solution in Mathematics and in Politics. I have tried this word out in a number of seminars and
workshops in different countries. Italian teacher participants begin by insisting that soluzione is the
same word in all disciplines, and then they begin to disagree with one another. I am told by Turkish
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workshop participants that in Turkish, ‘solution of a Maths problem’ is problemin çözümü, a

‘chemical solution’ to kimyasal çözelti, and there is no direct corresponding collocation for ‘political
solution’, which usually brings forth a rumble of sardonic laughter from some participants.
Thus, the role of the L1 in strategies for comprehending and then possibly acquiring vocabulary
could be a double-edged sword. We should also note that while the collocation standard hydrogen
electrode can be classified as a technical term, the word standard is anything but a technical word.
And this is not to mention the more generally cited academic (usually written) vocabulary of thus,as a
consequence, notwithstanding, with respect to, and so on.
Lastly, we should note the number of tokens that I have classified as ‘everyday talk’ or
‘vernacular’. Of course, what we mean by both these terms is open to a great deal of discussion. Some
readers may classify the phrase ‘massively challenging’ as being quite technical, and let us not forget
that in Physics, mass has a different meaning from massively and from Mass in religion. Nevertheless,
I think we could agree that words such as ‘explaining’, different, and fairly are all words students
might use in out-of-class everyday situations. Phrases such as … that you stick in something and get
into our head are common forms of expression in British English; that is, they are common in Inner
Circle varieties of English (see Chapter 5). They are not necessarily common forms in Outer
Circle varieties and in English as a Lingua Franca exchanges.
Furthermore, secondary school learners may find that the progression in the curriculum requires the
use of different words to describe the same concept. Young learners might be expected to know the
meaning of the following words: corrosive, sour, lemon, vinegar when these are introduced for the
first time. At a second stage, the expectation of lexical understanding might be: corrosive, sour, lemon
, vinegar, indicator. At a third stage, they might need to be confident with: indicator, salt, alkali,
neutralize, hydrogen. As Wellington and Osborne point out:

Concept words denote ideas at gradually ascending levels of abstraction. The difficulty is
magnified because these words cannot be understood in isolation. They are a part of a network of
other words, all related together, often in a ‘vertical structure’, i.e. the understanding of one word
(such as power) depends on prior understandings of other words (such as work and energy).
Without prior understandings, the structure collapses.
(Wellington & Osborne, 2001, p. 21)

Helping students with vocabulary in EMI settings

What strategies could EMI students use that were not mentioned in the Nural and Macaro study
described earlier? They could be encouraged to look at the prefixes and suffixes of words and to use
other forms of morphemic analysis to try to guess at the meaning, and then use that strategy to try to
acquire the word. However, this only pertains to highly specialized words, not to more general
academic vocabulary. For example, it would not be effective to assume that most English nouns end
in -or (conductor), -ate (sulphate), or -ion (notation) and to apply this as a strategy, especially given
that there are verbs such as gyrate, exfoliate, and debate, the last of which is both a noun and a verb.
They need to be encouraged to consider the potentially different senses of words and identify where
these do not match their current linguistic knowledge. They could be encouraged to consider the
differences between categories or words. Teachers could also suggest that they try to identify how
words are used in collocations (‘factual recall’), when these are opaque and when they are transparent.

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They could also turn their attention to compounds, (for example, screwdriver, service-provider, debt-
collector). Teachers could suggest that they take a text from one of their subjects and create some kind
of graphic image that shows the interconnectedness between words and concepts. This might be
particularly important in the transition between secondary and tertiary education because in the
former, technical words are often presented with some sort of visual support enabling the mapping of
the word to the concepts. Students could be taught how to self-select vocabulary as being the key
words in a text (Hedrick, Harmon, & Wood, 2008). In order not to always focus on written text, it
could be one that they recorded in a lesson or a lecture.
Very little research has been carried out in the EMI context in relation to helping students with their
strategic behaviour. Choi and Ma (2015) used student-selected vocabulary as an instructional
approach with low-achieving students in Hong Kong. Using a variety of techniques, which might be
called integrated Strategy-Based Instruction, or ‘SBI’ (Rubin, Chamot, Harris, & Anderson, 2007),
they found that ‘students selected words in a responsible way to meet with their academic needs and
achieved good retention rates of their personalised curriculum’ (Choi & Ma, 2015, p. 62). In the
tertiary phase, Brown (2013) carried out an intervention with first-year medical students in Japan by
administering vocabulary tests of medical English (Japanese to English) and then offering students a
vocabulary learning strategies (VLS) programme. An advantage here was that classes were relatively
small (13 to 15 students). The VLS programme involved goal-setting: students were asked how they
were proposing to learn, for example, 20 medical terms in English, and what their techniques were for
studying for a test the following week. They were then asked to evaluate and reflect upon (1) how
they actually did in the test and in what ways they considered themselves to be successful, (2) what
did not work so well, and (3) what they might do differently next time (pp. 284–285). The students
reported finding most aspects of the VLS part of the programme quite useful, claiming that it raised
their awareness of how they learnt these technical words. There was also some evidence that it
increased the breadth and depth of their specialist vocabulary. However, Brown found that although
the students rated the vocabulary test as important and useful, disappointingly, they found the self-
evaluation (short though it was) ‘troublesome or meaningless’ (p. 286). The author puts this down to
self-evaluation not being a practice that has any currency in Japan. This is one of the few studies on
VLS in an EMI context that I have been able to locate. If this is the actual situation, unlike in the case
of EFL, we just do not yet have the research database in EMI to make recommendations to students
about how to go about studying vocabulary. It would be dangerous, in my view, to ask EMI students
to devote time to experimenting with using certain VLSs without there being solid evidence that this
was time well spent during highly intensive programmes such as medicine.
One of the reasons I am suggesting caution is that words are so much more linked to larger
concepts in EMI than in EFL. We do not know what the potential taxonomy of strategies available
may be. This is all the more so because of the added weight placed on students by the EMI context.
As alluded to earlier, they are being asked to direct their learning effort to two disciplines: the content
subject and English. Their strategic behaviour will therefore require high levels of metacognition for
evaluating whether the strategies they are deploying are actually doing any good. And they will only
be able to evaluate this if (a) they have decided where to place more of their efforts (language or
content), and (b) they have come to some sort of understanding that content is inextricably related to
language (Coyle, Meyer, Halbach, & Schuck, in press).
We should also spare a thought for the EMI teachers (particularly if they are in a specified CLIL
context), who are already being asked to:
1mediate language between the learner and new knowledge
2develop subject language awareness
3plan with language in mind

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4carry out a curriculum language audit

5make general academic language explicit
6 create initial talk time
(Ball, Kelly, & Clegg, 2015, p. 71)

I am not suggesting that, in order for CLIL to work, these things are not necessary, merely that these
types of activities take a lot of time to carry out and need to be monitored to ensure that there is a
strategic uptake from the students, all the while ensuring that the students do as well in their content
subjects as if they were studying them through their L1. Given that in the field of language learner
strategies (i.e. where language acquisition is the principal objective) there is already disagreement as
to whether it is worthwhile giving up ‘teaching time’ in order to train students to use strategies
(LoCastro, 1994; Rees-Miller, 1993), then authors have to be very careful about recommending
strategy training in EMI, where the content subject is at least as important an objective, if not more
important.
The above caution notwithstanding, there is some research evidence (through systematic reviews
and meta-analyses) that strategy-based instruction (also known as ‘strategy training’) does bring
benefits to language acquisition (Graham & Macaro, 2008; Hassan et al., 2005; Macaro & Erler, 2008;
Plonsky, 2011). In the CLIL research literature, one or two young shoots of interest are appearing in
strategy-based instruction. Ruiz de Zarobe and Zenotz (2015) carried out a strategy training
intervention in reading comprehension in primary schools (10–11-year-old children) in the Basque
Country, which appeared to be quite successful. However, most of the strategies they cite as being the
ones that were taught to the children were based on a study by Macaro and Erler (2008), which was an
SLA study, not an EMI one, and the tasks that Ruiz de Zarobe and Zenotz used were adapted from the
‘Cambridge Young Learners’ English Test Flyers’ (p. 323). Thus, the strategies that they taught the
students (for example, scan the text, underline main ideas, use a dictionary) are, not surprisingly,
essentially language learning strategies. True, they added five items that lean more towards content
(for example, ‘I pay attention to words like ‘why’ that help me to anticipate that an explanation is
coming.’ p. 323), but even strategies such as these could be used to understand written or spoken text
in an SLA context. I mention this only to demonstrate that it is exceedingly difficult to locate EMI
strategy studies addressing content and language issues directly, an observation also recently made by
Meyer and Coyle (in press). It may be that strategies such as ‘underline main ideas’ (p. 330) have
resonance in both English language learning situations and EMI at the primary level, but I would
propose that as we move to secondary and tertiary phases (the ones focused on in this volume), the
strategy of underlining a main idea in a content text changes substantially because of the relationship
between the subject-specific term and the complexity of the underlying concept (see above). I invite
readers to try to do this in their own subject discipline.
It is clear from the above that we need some research evidence for strategy-based instruction in
EMI. However, I am aware that this merely adds to the volume of professional development needed
for content teachers, who do not have the hands-on experience of language teaching, nor even the
theoretical input that many language teachers are exposed to through pre-service and in-service
programmes.

Chapter summary
In this chapter I have attempted to draw a link between theory and research on strategic behaviour in
SLA contexts and learner strategies in EMI contexts. In the former, there is a long-standing tradition
and a recognizable research community (see Cohen & Macaro, 2007); in the latter, researchers are
only just beginning to carve out a research programme. It seems evident that the research programme
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will need to consider in much greater depth what is involved in learning an academic subject and how
the learning of that subject evolves and progresses through the educational trajectories of the learner.
I have focused mainly on two aspects of strategic behaviour: that related to listening comprehension
and that involved in vocabulary comprehension and acquisition. Focusing only on listening and
vocabulary has allowed me to look at their interconnectedness in some depth. Moreover, a number of
researchers in the strategies field have observed that listening comprehension is considered by
students to be a difficult skill. Yet it is one that, I have argued, is highly prevalent in both secondary
and tertiary EMI phases, where listening to the teacher becomes an everyday task for students. It is
somewhat ironic, therefore, that even though EMI students do so much listening, it is likely to be their
weakest skill. Or perhaps it is because they do so much listening that they consider it to be their
weakest skill.

The findings and tendency of the research reviewed

Regrettably, because of the dearth of research into EMI learner strategies, this chapter summary is
necessarily quite short. There are studies vaguely related to how students deal with the challenges of
the EMI classroom. Where there is some EMI strategy-based research, there are initial insights into
how limited the students’ repertoire is. Given that the research area is very much in its infancy, it
would be unwise to extrapolate any implication for teaching strategies to EMI students. There may be
more research into how students deal with vocabulary in EAP contexts, and this research will have
something to offer EMI researchers, but it is clearly not sufficiently related to simply superimpose on
EMI settings.
Nevertheless, we have noted, for example, in the fields of listening comprehension and vocabulary
acquisition, that there are some similarities between SLA and EMI in relation to the tasks that students
are expected to undertake. I have tried to describe, at a theoretical level, the important differences. It
will be the job of future EMI researchers to continue that process of identifying similarities and
differences in order to graft future research design and research instruments onto previous SLA
strategies research. In other words, I do not believe that EMI researchers need to ‘re-invent the wheel’,
but they do need to take extreme care in their designs and instruments to ensure that they are indeed
tapping into the different challenges that EMI presents students with compared to those in SLA.
As in many other chapters in this book, my call would be for future research to devise research
questions not only related to phase-specific learner strategies but also to cross-phase strategies. Thus,
some tentative research questions, and specifically in relation to the two aspects of language focused
on in this chapter (listening comprehension and vocabulary), might be as follows:
1What are the challenges that students encounter as they move from secondary to
tertiary EMI education and attempt to adapt their strategic behaviour?
2What strategies are deployed by those students who most successfully accommodate to
the new phase?
3To what extent is this successful accommodation (with content knowledge being
controlled for) dependent on (a) their English linguistic knowledge (particularly the
breadth and depth of their mental lexicon) and (b) their being highly strategic?
4How do students use strategies differently in the different EMI listening tasks that they
are required to undertake (for example, listening to a teacher exposition, listening to an
interactive exchange, listening to others in groupwork discussions, listening to and
viewing videorecording, listening to presentations by fellow students)?
Macaro, Ernesto. English Medium Instruction, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
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Of course, these research questions on strategic behaviour only relate to listening, and only at the level
of description. Once the description has been achieved and the variables therein identified, we then
need to tackle the whole research agenda related to strategy instruction in EMI and whether it works.
So there is plenty more research to be done.

Notes
NOTE 1Others, depending on the task, would be phonemic awareness, sociocultural knowledge,
and pragmatic knowledge.
NOTE 2Word ‘tokens’ are the total number of words in any selected text, whereas word ‘types’ are
the number of different words in any selected text. Thus, in the preceding sentence there are
25 word tokens but fewer word types because, for example, the word ‘text’ would
only be counted once.
NOTE 3Tureng is a bilingual online Turkish English dictionary.
NOTE 4Reproduced by kind permission of my colleague Jenni Ingram.

Macaro, Ernesto. English Medium Instruction, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
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