ABSTRACT
Using English to teach and learn academic subjects in non-English-dominant countries has greatly increased over the last decades, raising linguistic, pedagogical, and intercultural questions. Since most English-medium instruction (EMI) stakeholders are not English native speakers, code-switching is often employed as a strategy to facilitate vocabulary and content learning as well as to ensure meaningful communication and interaction in class. The main goal of this chapter is to explore how EMI lecturers from five European universities resorted to their multilingual repertoire to enhance academic learning, interaction, and engagement in class. To address these issues, data were taken from the TAEC corpus. The findings show which languages are mostly employed, their proportion with respect to the participants' first language (L1), and the most frequent functions of code-switching. The results indicate that switching between languages fulfils various communicative and pedagogical functions, including, in frequency order, lexical gap fillings, vocabulary explanation, cultural references, lesson management, explanation of jokes and anecdotes, and comprehension checks. Taken together, these results offer a better understanding of the role played by multilingualism in EMI settings.
