As English-medium Instruction (EMI) occupies an increasingly important role at universities in non-Anglophone countries across the globe, the need to innovate the methodological tools used to investigate this phenomenon also becomes more pressing. This talk aims to offer an example of how adopting a transdisciplinary approach can benefit EMI research, allowing for some light to be shed on the connections between contemporary higher education reforms and the increase of EMI.

To that end, the talk discusses the case of the 2012 Polytechnic University of Milan litigation, which saw 100 professors sue the institution over its new EMI-only policy. A Process Tracing (Beach & Pedersen 2019) approach, novel not only to the case, but to Applied Linguistics itself, is adopted in order to unveil the causal processes driving (and hindering) EMI in this particular context, unravelling how the Italian frame of civil law and public governance shaped the final outcome. Developed in the context of the ELEMENTAL project, the analysis gathers evidence from a diverse dataset of interviews with the petitioning lecturers, official documents from the legal proceedings, as well as interviews with three elite participants: the Minister of Education, the rector who promoted the EMI policy and the lawyer (also a member of the academic staff) who represented the petitioners in court.   

Preliminary findings about the Polytechnic of Milan case study suggest a relationship between a higher education policy of autonomy and the promotion of EMI. This, in turn, highlights the benefits of adopting a transdisciplinary approach to EMI that encompasses the public governance dimension, towards a deeper understanding of the phenomenon and its root causes.