Preparing EMI Content Teachers for Global Englishes in Tunisia: Implications for Global South Higher Education

The internationalization of higher education has fueled the spread of English-medium instruction (EMI) across the Global South. This expansion has raised the pedagogical demands placed on content teachers, who are often expected to teach disciplinary subjects through English with little or no preparation for multilingual classrooms. In Tunisia, EMI is now increasingly established in scientific, technical, and postgraduate programs, yet its implementation remains largely ad hoc. Teaching takes place in a multilingual environment shaped by Tunisian Arabic, French, and English, while institutional expectations often rest on monolingual and native-speaker-oriented assumptions. This disconnect raises questions about how EMI teacher education can respond to the realities of multilingual higher education. This paper sets out to develop the Global Englishes-informed Multilingual (GEM) Framework as a conceptual model for EMI teacher education. Based on a theory-driven qualitative synthesis of research on EMI, Global Englishes, multilingual pedagogy, and disciplinary communication, the framework addresses recurring challenges in teaching, classroom interaction, and assessment. It is made up of five interconnected dimensions. The first is disciplinary communication and the second intelligibility-oriented communication, followed by multilingual pedagogy, critical language awareness, and assessment reorientation. The framework offers a coherent basis for content teacher development and brings the communicative demands of disciplinary teaching into dialogue with Global Englishes and multilingual pedagogy. Multilingualism is treated as an integral feature of EMI, with intelligibility and inclusion at the center. Although the framework was developed with Tunisia in mind, it can be relevant to other Global South contexts where multilingualism is embedded in education and where English operates alongside other languages in academic life.