Listening as the field of language teaching speaks to itself - 2

Editorial · Hu & Hashim · Ellis · Machida

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This is the second in a series of posts in which I analyse the May 2026 issue of JALT Journal cover to cover, reading not so much for what each piece contributes but for what the whole reveals about the world the writers share.

Beyond Language Barriers: Rethinking the Role of CLIL-ised EMI in Shaping Higher Education — Hengzhi Hu and Harwati Hashim

A summary of the article

As more university courses worldwide are taught in English, it is becoming clear that students often need more language support. This article, written from a Malaysian higher education context, presents CLIL-ised EMI as a flexible way for subject teachers to include that support in their normal teaching, without redesigning whole courses. It shows how teachers can respond to students' language difficulties and subject demands within institutional limits — reward structures that recognise content delivery but not language support, syllabi that do not specify language goals, and a lack of time and training for anything beyond standard content teaching.

The article is valuable because it identifies a real pressure point in higher education: content teachers are increasingly expected to support language learning, but the systems around them have not been designed to make that work coherent, comfortable and sustainable.

Clarifying the mindset

Reading the editorial pages was a surprise. I had expected routine content — the mechanical business of introducing a journal issue — and found it unexpectedly revealing of the assumptions the field of ELT takes for granted.

This article surprised me in a different way. The problem it addresses — how language teaching and content learning can effectively and sustainably be integrated — is one I have been working on since at least 1990, when I co-edited a special issue of The Language Teacher on global issues in language education. What surprised me was not the argument. It was how hard the argument was to understand.

This is not a criticism of the writers. They are working within a peer-reviewed professional culture and are trying to articulate something important. What the difficulty reveals is something about that culture — a mindset that appears to be reaching toward systemic integration while being structurally prevented from achieving it by the very language, thinking patterns and professional culture it has been trained in. It is this mindset that I want to clarify here.

The article title

First half: Beyond Language Barriers

Beyond Language Barriers — is a phrase that can sound attractive without necessarily inviting critical reflection. The word beyond itself suggests the article will outline a crossing into fresh territory. The word barriers invites these questions: What is standing in the way of what? How have they been identified? Who experiences them as barriers and how do they react to them? Who wants to communicate with whom? What needs to be communicated?

Second half: Rethinking the Role of CLIL-ised EMI in Shaping Higher Education

The phrase CLIL-ised EMI jumps out for two reasons. The first is that readers who are not already familiar with the field need to have this jargon explained to them. The second is that CLIL-ised itself is a mouthful that is physically difficult to pronounce.

By the time the reader has understood the terminology and perhaps attempted to say it, the subtitle has already become what the title promises to go beyond: a language barrier.

Rethinking implies that a prior thinking is being revised — that something has been examined, found wanting, and reconsidered. Will the article show that process?

Shaping higher education implies institutional scale — a whole system being reformed. Will the article address systemic change?

The two halves of the title are starkly different. One is a broad human aspiration, accessible to anyone. The other is the language of a narrow specialism. The reader will need to read on to see whether the article successfully integrates them.

The article itself

The opening pages take four paragraphs to establish that CLIL and EMI are different things. Each paragraph approaches the same distinction from a slightly different angle, with a different set of citations attached. The distinction itself — EMI treats language development as incidental; CLIL treats it as co-equal and designed in from the outset — could be stated very briefly. This pattern of restating and carefully citing holds throughout the article.

What follows is worth looking at closely, because three sentences from the body reveal something about the mindset that no summary can quite capture. The issue is not that what the sentences are saying is wrong. It is that each sentence shows how the field has learned to speak: carefully, indirectly, and through inherited authority.

The first:

Lecturers' recognition of students' language-related difficulties and their willingness to respond to these challenges are foundational to CLIL-ized EMI, as previous research underscores the importance of nurturing pedagogical dispositions that view language support as integral to subject learning, particularly in linguistically diverse EMI contexts (Kavak & Kırkgöz, 2023; Muttaqin, 2022).

In plain English: teacher awareness of students' language difficulties, and willingness to respond to them, are the foundation of CLIL-ised EMI. Teachers need to notice when students are struggling, be willing to respond, and see language support as part of teaching their subject — not as an extra responsibility that belongs only to the language teacher.

Two citations are attached to an observation that many experienced teachers would recognise immediately. Any experienced teacher in an EMI classroom will notice this. The scholars cited have almost certainly noticed it the same way. What this very familiar kind of writing tells us is that for many researchers the professional culture of the field requires that practical observations be grounded in prior literature before they can be stated. The effect is to make the obvious look like the prerogative of theorists, and to give greater weight to published theory than to lived experience.

But the observation addresses the symptom, not the cause. The symptom is that teachers treat language support as someone else's responsibility. The cause is that the system has divided the work into roles that are not coordinated. Nobody is wrong within their role. The system produces the gap. Awareness of this, and a positive response to that awareness from individual teachers, are necessary — but they do not address the structural problem in the system itself. And as we will see, the article's proposed response to that structural problem is to add more to the teacher's load.

One sentence reveals the assumed direction of travel. CLIL, the article says,

is conceptualized by Coyle et al. and developed by subsequent scholars — underpinned by a principled integration of content and language objectives from the outset.

The direction is from theory to instruction to learner. What the sentence cannot ask is: what are teachers who are already doing this actually doing? What are learners experiencing? The framework begins with scholars and ends with students. The students are where the chain terminates, not where it begins.

Another sentence reveals where the learner sits in that chain. CLIL-ised EMI, the article says, empowers students to take ownership of their learning. The instinct is right — learner agency matters. But the sentence does not show how the design produces that outcome. The mechanism — how language support creates the conditions for ownership — is not explained. Agency is something the teacher arranges for the learner to have, not something the learner exercises from their own position. The learner remains at the end of the chain.

The article's response to the barriers it has identified is a list of prescribed techniques: pre-teach vocabulary, model sentence structures, provide bilingual scaffolds, adjust assessment rubrics, run reflective forums, develop discipline-specific scaffolding, co-teach with language specialists, sequence tasks for gradual linguistic complexity. Institutional policy has its own section — promotion criteria, syllabus language, funding — but it is not architecturally developed. The recommendations are addressed to individual lecturers adjusting their classroom practice. The institution itself is not asked to change its shape.

The rethinking the subtitle promises turns out to mean: add these practices to what you are already doing. The systemic change the subtitle implies does not appear. The title's two halves — the broad human aspiration and the narrow specialism — are placed beside each other in the article as they are in the title. The reader who wanted to see whether the article successfully integrates them will not find the answer here.

The weight of what is being proposed falls on the teacher.

The article's conclusion

Throughout the body, the writers are careful in the way the professional culture of the field requires. Claims are attributed to sources before being made. Problems are softened: lecturers may lack confidence; some students experience cognitive overload; one recurring issue can be the invisibility of language-sensitive teaching. The passive voice carries the recommendations: language support can be woven into content instruction; scaffolding techniques should be tailored to the discipline; assessment practices should also evolve.

In the conclusion, that caution lifts. The model, the authors say, disrupts conventional boundaries, challenges institutional assumptions, and invites democratic modes of teaching and learning. It offers an opportunity to reimagine global universities as inclusive, dialogic, critically engaged spaces.

None of these claims is substantially addressed in the body of the article. The body does not disrupt boundaries; it works within them. It does not challenge institutional assumptions; it accommodates them. Democratic teaching, dialogic universities — these words appear here for the first time. The connection between these aspirations and the eight techniques listed earlier is not drawn.

The conclusion is where beyond briefly means what it says. But the crossing it describes has not taken place in the article.

A different kind of map is needed

There is an irony here that is worth naming. The article is arguing for cross-disciplinarity — for content teachers and language teachers to stop treating their domains as separate and find a common ground. But the argument is made in a language that only specialists can read. The content teacher the article most needs to reach cannot get in. The call to cross the barrier is written in a language that maintains it.

This is not a failure of the writers. It may be evidence that the academic discourse of the field does not permit the kind of structural thinking that the problems it identifies actually require. The tools for a different approach exist — Allwright and Hanks' Exploratory Practice, for instance, places teachers and learners as the originators of understanding rather than its recipients. That tradition does not get a mention in this article.

The writers clearly sense that technique is not enough. The conclusion reaches for something beyond it — disrupted boundaries, reimagined universities, democratic teaching. But the article's map only shows techniques. What the conclusion is reaching for needs a different kind of map, and a different language for drawing it.