Learners’ Views of EMI: Non-Native Speaker Teachers’ Competence and ELF in an Italian Master’s Degree Programme.

This paper reports on a qualitative study investigating the opinions on English Medium
Instruction (EMI) held by Italian students of an EMI Master’s degree programme of the
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Data for this study were elicited by means of
semi-structured interviews and are taken from a larger ongoing doctoral research study
of students’ attitudes towards English and its pedagogy that combines descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis. Respondents discussed EMI and Internationalisation at
Home (IaH) in relation to a number of other topics, including: non-native speaker
teacher (NNST)'s competence, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and multilingualism,
students’ motivation, international students and teachers. Although the majority of the
respondents expressed satisfaction with their learning experience, and they all revealed
a positive attitude towards EMI, they were also unanimously critical of the communicative competence in English of the non-native speaker teachers (NNSTs) of the nonlanguage courses. Due to the limited number of instances reported, further research is
needed to validate the results. Nevertheless, it is hoped that this paper may provide
useful contribution to the task of leading to better-informed ways of integrating language and disciplinary content for the internationalisation of academic curricula.