Learning to see with an engineer’s eye: disciplinary literacies in EMI engineering education

Abstract

The study examines how disciplinary knowledge is constructed and communicated in English-medium instruction (EMI) engineering classrooms and how students and instructors navigate disciplinary learning through multiple linguistic and semiotic resources. Based on qualitative data from an instructor interview and interviews with seventeen undergraduate students at an English-medium engineering program at a university in Türkiye, the study explores how disciplinary knowledge is represented in course design and how it is experienced and practiced by the instructor and students. The findings show that disciplinary meaning-making in engineering is fundamentally multisemiotic. It requires students to integrate verbal, mathematical, visual, and technological resources, engage with discipline-specific genres, and develop engineering ways of formulating and solving problems. While English plays an important role as the medium of instruction, it does not emerge as the primary barrier to conceptual understanding. Instead, linguistic challenges are more evident in classroom participation and the spontaneous articulation of disciplinary knowledge through English. The data also reveal that the instructor and students mobilise translanguaging practices to navigate and negotiate disciplinary meaning and students use digital resources strategically to revisit, supplement, and personalise learning. The study contributes to EMI research by showing how multilingual, transsemiotic, functional, and technological dimensions of disciplinary literacy intersect in engineering education, and by highlighting transsemiotic integration as a central challenge in students’ disciplinary participation.