English-Medium Instructional (EMI) learning-teaching environments are essential realms of multimodal meaning-making realized in higher education. However, despite the call for an ‘evidence-based and data-led’ approach to the lecturers’ professional development and pedagogical competence, the research into EMI classroom interactions remains limited in terms of being harvested into insights for practitioners and leading the way forward. Correspondingly, our project sets out to explore 300 hours of classroom interactional data gathered from the EMI learning-teaching environments. Our efforts of covering sixty-five programs in four different universities, including theoretical and applied life sciences and humanities, as well as three different course types:
1. lecture/direct lecture,
2. interactive seminar,
3. laboratory/studio,
while ensuring five to seven hours of data from each of the sites created one of the substantial dilemmas we faced between generalizability and prolonged engagement (Goffman, 1989). While the project researchers
benefited from their position of unique adequacy (Wakefield, 2000) as they are higher education professionals in the field of teacher education, pandemic-induced lockdowns deprived tertiary education of all hands-on opportunities and ensuing video-mediated online learning-teaching environments with unique configurations of multimodality created new unknowns that required adaptive planning for
1. face-to-face,
2. hybrid,
3. online
courses. Using a data-driven, participant-relevant approach of multimodal Conversation Analysis, the findings are conducive to the expanding research on EMI and have possible pedagogical and research implications for our understanding of contemporary research into EMI university classrooms.