Occupying a new space: oral language skills within the disciplines in English-medium instruction

Bilingual education programmes involving English are currently experiencing an unprecedented rise in popularity, both at school and at university levels. While one of the aims of such educational programmes lies in developing both academic knowledge and language proficiency, our understanding of the interface between these two elements – language and content – is still developing. In this contribution I argue that one fruitful means of conceptualising this content and language interface is by focussing on disciplinary language, i.e. the language specific to a school subject or academic discipline. While the study of disciplinary literacies, with their prime consideration of reading and writing, has received some research attention (see e.g. Airey, 2011; Kuteeva & Airey, 2014), the more dynamic area of oral language in the subject classroom has been less focussed on. By drawing on an existing body of research, I show how disciplinary language within English Medium Instruction (EMI) is positioned by teachers and learners at both upper-secondary and tertiary levels of education. I place equal focus on two areas of research; firstly, I outline the perceptions of students and teachers towards (oral) disciplinary language, showing the difficulty of clearly positioning it on a continuum from ‘language’ to ‘content’ and the diverse interpretations of participants within EMI educational endeavours. The second area of research addresses student oral 1. University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria; julia.huettner@univie.ac.at How to cite this chapter: Hüttner, J. (2019). Occupying a new space: oral language skills within the disciplines in Englishmedium instruction. In B. Loranc-Paszylk (Ed.), Rethinking directions in language learning and teaching at university level (pp. 5-26). Research-publishing.net. https://doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2019.31.889