English-Medium Instruction in the Global South: A Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reflection from the Classroom

Abstract

English-medium instruction (EMI) is widely promoted in the Global South as an “inevitable” route to internationalisation and employability in the higher education agenda, yet in classrooms it often intensifies students’ challenges with following lectures, asking questions, and demonstrating disciplinary understanding in a second/foreign language. This reflective article adopts a lens of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) to move beyond polarised debates about EMI and focus instead on what counts as good teaching and fair learning when English is not students’ strongest shared language. Drawing on my personal experience, it examines how EMI can produce an “inequality of voice,” how disciplinary literacies become hidden language demands, how multilingual practices function as resources rather than failures, and how assessment may conflate content knowledge with English proficiency. The article argues that SoTL offers a practical set of ethics for EMI under constraint, turning student difficulties into investigable learning bottlenecks, and supporting evidence-informed redesign of participation structures, scaffolding, and assessment.