Exploring language-related episodes (LREs) in English-medium instruction (EMI) from a translanguaging and multimodal perspective

With the expansion of English-medium Instruction (EMI) programmes in European universities, studies have begun to point at the linguistic challenges faced by lecturers and students and suggest the need to increase the focus on language in English-taught content lectures. Language-related episodes (LREs), intended as brief transitory shifts of the topic of the discourse from content to language, could be a way of focusing on language within content-based activities. The present study aims to identify the occurrence of LREs in engineering lectures at a Spanish multilingual university and explore their construction from a translanguaging and multimodal perspective. For this purpose, a series of videotaped and verbatim transcribed lectures were analysed following previous frameworks for Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA). Results indicate that LREs do occur, with a highly variant frequency rate across lectures. Furthermore, multiple semiotic resources and translanguaging practices are used and play a major contribution to the meaning-making process of the LREs. The outcome of this study calls for a multimodal reconceptualization of LREs and shows instances of good practices that can be potentially included in professional training programmes to develop EMI lecturer awareness.