Joyce Kling is a senior lecturer at Lund University in Sweden. She has worked as an English teacher and teacher-trainer for over 30 years. Over the course of her career, she has worked as an ESL & EFL teacher, program director and administrator, teacher trainer, researcher, materials developer, author, and consultant. She publishes in the areas of English-medium instruction (EMI), teacher cognition, the international classroom, and language testing. Her work appears in TESOL Quarterly, Journal of English-Medium Instruction, as well as several edited volumes and monographs. She currently serves as TESOL International President 2022-23.

The widespread implementation of English medium instruction (EMI) has resulted in a discussion as to how language development in EMI courses and programs can be supported. Since disciplinary instruction in EMI contexts in non-English dominant contexts is often associated with teaching and learning of content without specific language learning goals and outcomes, the responsibility often falls onto language teachers to bridge gaps in both student and teacher academic and disciplinary English competencies for teaching and learning through English. As language learning is typically not the focus of EMI instruction, there is often a lack of opportunity for students to develop their genre specific knowledge and all the domains therein. However, through cross-disciplinary cooperation, development, and teaching, this can change. By building a sustainable infrastructure with language teachers and content teachers in dialogue, EMI curricula can begin to address language and academic literacy needs. In this presentation, I will describe three case studies drawn from a strategic initiative at the University of Copenhagen that build on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) methodologies developed to support students’ learning of disciplinary content, as well as teachers’ abilities to support learning through English. Through the cases, I will demonstrate how collaboration between language teachers and content teachers can provide dual benefits, i.e., a) highlighting necessary explicit academic language aspects not addressed by content teachers and b) supporting and training content teachers as they work with curricular development in EMI contexts.