Abu Saleh Mohammad Rafi
Special Issue Information
Dear colleagues
English medium instruction (EMI) in the neoliberal era has become increasingly prevalent in Global South classrooms as a marker of quality education and internationalisation. In this Special Issue, "Global South" refers to the suffering and inequality caused by capitalism and colonialism in geographic regions that have not achieved the same economic, social, or political success as the wealthier regions of the Global North. The Global South classrooms are often characterised by a shortage of trained teachers and bilingualism-focused teacher education programmes, students with low English proficiency, and irrelevant materials dominated by western perspectives. Uncritical implementation of EMI policies in these classrooms frequently results in a gap between policy and actual practices featuring various expressions of multilingualism such as metrolingualism, polylanguaging, codemeshing, and translanguaging, among others. While scholars in the Global North have achieved notable success in utilising these multilingual practices for pedagogical purposes, scholars in the Global South appear to be caught in a deficit model of EMI that frequently fails to account for the realities of Global South classrooms or produce satisfactory results. Furthermore, the traditional concentration of EMI on the English language and Anglo-centric knowledge structures marginalises the languages and epistemologies of the Global South.
In this Special Issue, I invite you to examine the uncritical implementations of EMI in Global South classrooms as well as the hopeful glimpses that the gap between EMI policy and practice provides for multilingual and multicultural education in the service of a more equitable and inclusive world.
Abu Saleh Mohammad Rafi
