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Certifying the linguistic and communicative competencies of teachers in English-medium instruction programmes

Abstract Language teaching centres have been tasked predominantly with ensuring that prospective and enrolled students are able to fulfil established language criteria required for both domestic and international study programmes. It is less common, however, that language centres are responsible for ensuring the language and communicative skills of teaching staff in English-taught programmes as it is widely assumed that teaching staff possess such skills at a high level. In order to address this gap in internationalized higher education, the English Medium Instruction (EMI) unit from the Language Teaching Centre at the University of Freiburg has developed a procedure to certify the quality of language use in English-taught programmes. This certification procedure (referred to as English Medium Instruction Quality Management or EMIQM for short) uses specific criteria to assess linguistic as well as communicative competencies required to teach a multilingual, multicultural student body in an English-taught programme. Establishing such a procedure has the following advantages: assuring the quality of the teaching staff’s language use in English-taught programmes; motivating teachers to reflect on and potentially adapt their use of language and communicative strategies when teaching in the international classroom; and enabling language teaching centres to contribute further to universities’ internationalization efforts.