Mediation strategies in EMI: Facilitating access to knowledge through language

The lecture is an educational genre that combines information from various sources making it accessible to students, promoting content learning, and inspiring critical reflection. These characteristics rely on mediation, namely the practice of guiding learning through language. The Council of Europe's CEFR Companion Volume (2020) provides a valuable framework for understanding mediation and identifying the common characteristics of this practice across proficiency levels. However, applying the framework to real language performance and providing specific feedback to English-medium instruction (EMI) lecturers can be challenging, because descriptors are too broad and do not offer examples of how mediation is realised in concrete terms. To address this problem, this chapter describes authentic instances of language use for mediation purposes, showing how the CEFR descriptors can be operationalised in the analysis of EMI lecturers' performance. The data for this study are taken from the TAEC Corpus, which collects 30 EMI lectures rated according to the proficiency level of the teachers and collected across a range of European universities. It will be argued that adequate language proficiency is crucial for effective mediation practices in EMI and that the difficulties experienced by B2- (minus) level instructors may affect lecture comprehension, classroom interaction, and ultimately learning.