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The Introduction to this Special Issue on ELT and English-medium education in multilingual university settings provides a picture of the dynamic backdrop to the issues addressed by our contributing writers. We begin with a reflection on the nature of ELT and then move to a discussion of the specific nature of English-medium education in higher education globally. The Introduction underlines the importance of respecting and drawing on students' multilingual repertoires, and the opportunities this affords for decolonising ELT in university settings.

In the past decades, and as a result of the internationalisation processes experienced by higher education across the world, English-medium education (EME) has gained momentum in universities where well-established national and/or local languages had traditionally been the means of instruction. While this phenomenon is growing at a fast pace, professional support for the lecturers engaged is very often scarce and unsystematic. Against this backdrop, the EU project known as EQUiiP (Educational Quality at Universities for Inclusive International Programmes) takes as point of departure the support of a specific set of agents -- educational developers (EDs) -- who, although essential in the design and implementation of internationalised programmes, has attracted scarce research attention. Drawing conceptually on the ROAD-MAPPING framework (Dafouz, E., and U. Smit. [2016]. "Towards a Dynamic Conceptual Framework for English-Medium Education in Multilingual University Settings." "Applied Linguistics" 37 (3): 397-415) and with the help of data from a baseline survey gathered by EQUiiP, this paper explores the roles, beliefs and practices of EDs in these concrete internationalised programmes. Our findings reveal great differences in these agents' backgrounds and areas of expertise as well as different perspectives on the roles of language(s), and more particularly English, in the process of internationalising higher education.

English as a foreign language is no longer the sole object of specialized language classes, but increasingly a medium of university-level instruction in a range of content areas. This leads to a complex interaction between new academic content and the means of expressing this expertise through appropriate disciplinary language uses. Conceptually, this study focuses on oral disciplinary-reasoning episodes, in which knowledge structures are explicitly developed. These episodes exemplify diverse ways whereby disciplinary meaning making is co-constructed in English-medium instruction (EMI), with one specific type being language-related episodes which clarify specific items of terminology. Drawing on INTE-R-LICA, an international and interdisciplinary project, the database under investigation covers 671 minutes (67,605 words) of classroom discourse from a Spanish business administration degree programme. Findings suggest a structural diversity within these episodes, which are jointly constructed, and involve a rich variety of discursive strategies to effectuate meaning making. Our results indicate that an understanding of the crucial role of language in this disciplinary meaning-making process is essential for the TESOL profession to remain relevant in the current English language teaching educational landscape. In addition to providing expert input into the potential of a language-sensitive EMI pedagogy, TESOL teacher education will need to foster both language and content teachers' awareness of the disciplinary nature of classroom discourse and its role in developing subject expertise among their students.

With English-medium instruction (EMI) gaining momentum in higher education across the globe, teacher education programmes (TEPs) are being redesigned to equip lecturers with the skills necessary to deal with increasingly international classrooms. While most of these TEPs mainly pursue improving lecturers' English language proficiency they rarely reflect on pedagogical changes and even less on the ideological forces and identity issues at play. This article addresses precisely such gaps by focusing on ideology and identity drawing on two complementary conceptual models: Investment theory and ROAD-MAPPING. These models are used in a qualitative content analysis of the online written responses of EMI lecturers at a Spanish public university. The findings reveal that lecturers unanimously agreed that EMI had enhanced their linguistic and social capital providing the younger teachers with a more international professional identity and a promising academic future. Concurrently, lecturers expressed their concerns about the necessary co-existence of languages (Spanish and English), particularly with respect to teachers' responsibility to provide students with disciplinary literacy in both languages so that graduates become competent professionals at a local/ global level. The article closes with reflections and implications for designing TEPs in EMI settings.

At a time of increasing internationalization in tertiary education, English-Medium Education in Multilingual University Settings (EMEMUS) has become a common practice. While there is already ample research describing this phenomenon at a local level (Smit and Dafouz 2012a), the theoretical side needs to be elaborated. This article thus aims to develop a conceptual framework that considers the dynamic nature of EMEMUS. Drawing on recent sociolinguistic orientations and discursive approaches (e.g. Scollon and Scollon 2004; Shohamy 2006; Blommaert 2010; Hult 2010), our framework regards EMEMUS as a social phenomenon and views discourse as the access point to six relevant dimensions. These dimensions are considered as inherently complex, contextually bound, and intersecting dynamically with one another. Focusing on an example from a higher education institution, the article argues for the utility of the proposed framework.

For years, universities worldwide have offered English-medium degrees as a way to attract international students and staff, enhance their institutional profile and promote multilingualism. In Europe and the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), English-medium instruction (EMI) is more recent, but the dimension and speed of its implementation has outpaced language policies, methodological considerations and empirical research. In view of this, this paper focuses on an empirical study examining the effect that the teaching of a Business Administration degree in English as a foreign language may have on Spanish students' academic performance (as measured through coursework and final grades), when compared to their counterparts' learning in Spanish. Students' grades are analysed in three different disciplinary subjects and treated statistically. Findings show that both cohorts obtain similar results, suggesting that the language of instruction does not seem to compromise students' learning of academic content. Differences, however, are found regarding learners' performance in the three disciplinary subjects under scrutiny, with history yielding slightly higher results than accounting and finance. This finding runs counter to the general belief that the more verbal subjects, like history, would have a "limiting" effect on EMI students' final performance and, moreover, raises questions concerning disciplinary differences and assessment.