Internationalisation in The Time of Covid. Online And English as Media Of Instruction At The University. A Case Study.

The abrupt shift to remote instruction in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the intersection of two emerging trends in international higher education: English-Medium Instruction (EMI) and online learning. This paper investigates lecturer's talk in the EMI classroom in two different learning formatsface-to-face (F2F) and online synchronous video lecture (SVL)at the University of Bologna. By making use of a discourse analytical and multimodal framework, this study shows that in SVL lecturer's talk tends to be less monologic and is characterized by a greater variety of speech acts. Furthermore, given that online settings provide lecturers with a wider variety of modes, "[m]ultimodal competence plays a crucial role in effective interactive lecturing, especially when the language of communication is other than one's own" (Morell, 2018, p. 70). The findings of this study have implications for designing customized support training for EMI lecturers.