Reconceptualising English Medium Instruction in Higher Education: Insights from a Global Englishes Meta-Synthesis in the Chinese Context

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, City University of Macau, Macau, China

2 Department of English Language Education, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

10.30466/ijltr.2026.57672.3490

Abstract

The rapid expansion of English Medium Instruction (EMI) in higher education is largely driven by the forces of globalisation and marketisation. Although existing EMI syntheses have evaluated language and content outcomes or synthesised factors associated with academic success, programme quality, teacher development, and translanguaging research, less is known about how language ideology, knowledge legitimacy, curriculum, assessment, teacher positioning, and learner identity interact within the multilingual ecology of mainland Chinese universities. Through the lens of Global Englishes (GE), this study addressed this gap by using the 13 dimensions of the Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT) framework to synthesise finding segments from 25 qualitative studies. The meta-synthesis generated a higher-order account of Chinese EMI as an analytical progression from systemic misalignment, through multilingual reconceptualisation, to the institutional, curricular, and pedagogical embedding of multilingualism. By explaining how linguistic and epistemic legitimacy is organised across EMI, the study extends outcome- and factor-oriented reviews and reframes EMI quality as a problem of curricular alignment rather than English delivery alone.

Keywords

Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research
Volume 14, 3 (Special Issue)
November 2026
Pages 49-71

Files

History

  • Receive Date: 28 September 2026
  • Accept Date: 21 October 2026

Share

How to cite

Statistics