University instructors' and students' perspectives on multilingual questioning practices in an EMI setting

The rise of English-medium Instruction (EMI) has been evident in many countries, including Türkiye. This study investigates classroom interaction in an EMI foundation university in Istanbul, Türkiye. The data gathered from classroom observations (i.e., in electrics electronics and computer engineering courses), stimulated recall (SR) sessions with the content instructors, and semi-structured interviews with the undergraduate students revealed how the interaction unfolds in a multilingual EMI classroom setting in higher education (HE). The classroom data was transcribed using Conversation Analysis (CA), focusing on multimodality (Jefforsan, 2004; Mondada, 2018). The SR sessions and semi-structured interviews were transcribed and coded employing Strauss and Corbin's (1990, p. 61) coding scheme in MAXQDA (MAX Qualitative Data Analysis). The relationship among the question types of three categories, namely, form (i.e., closed and open-ended), content (i.e., facts, reason-explanation, opinion), and purpose (i.e., referential, display, rhetorical), was presented with visual and statistical data. The findings revealed differences between the questioning practices of lecturers whose first languages differed. Both lecturers displayed translanguaging practices during classroom observations to achieve meaning-making and create content knowledge with help of instructional strategies. Student-initiated questions and undergraduate students' insights about the EMI setting (i.e., reasons for favoring or not favoring) were also analyzed. The study's findings provide implications for a greater grasp of face-to-face EMI classroom interaction with a particular focus on translanguaging and questioning practices of instructors and undergraduate engineering students. Keywords: classroom interaction, english medium instruction, multimodal conversation analysis, questioning practices, translanguaging