This paper addresses the question of how undergraduate students negotiate linguistic competence of their university lecturers following the switch of the classroom medium of instruction from German to English. Emphasizing the concept of intersubjectivity in classroom communities of practice, this paper aims at revealing interpretative repertoires underlying the students' display of the lecturers' communicative behaviour. Discussing selected scenes from two science lectures with undergraduate students, the paper shows that the successful implementation of English-medium instruction crucially depends on the lecturers' ability to negotiate communicative-didactic rather than linguistic competence.

In light of the Bologna reform, professional and vocational schools have progressively moved towards becoming formal higher education institutions. In this context, Universities of Teacher Education (UTE) in Switzerland have undergone significant changes with respect to their role in society over the past decades. One of the major changes in this process concerns the training of research skills in formal teacher education. Part of this training includes writing assignments, such as the bachelor's thesis, with which students demonstrate their ability to participate in scientific discourses. This paper analyses the degree to which students engage in personal reflexivity when carrying out academic writing tasks, focusing, in particular, on how reflexivity is appraised by their thesis supervisors. The analysis of bachelor's theses and their evaluations from one Swiss UTE show that thesis supervisors show ambivalent and contradictory attitudes towards the self‐reflective engagement of their students.

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Interaction undoubtedly is key to learning in higher education. It is particularly relevant in an English medium instruction (EMI) setting when students use a foreign language for learning as it provides important opportunities for the negotiation of meaning. In this article, we present and critically discuss EMI teacher training interventions in Switzerland designed to encourage dialogic interaction in the EMI classroom. EMI teacher training interventions, in the case of this study, rely on the EMI teaching competence reference framework outlined in Studer (2018). Through observations, (self-)assessments and surveys, teachers are assessed against four levels of attention to language in their classes, ranging from a focus on mutual comprehension to dialogue and the formal integration of language into the content of their classes. The paper shows that many EMI teachers tend to be more concerned with basic language and monologic competence, while sidelining dialogic competence. The paper will also show that the mental switch required to move the focus from ‘stage performance’ and self-awareness to authentic dialogue represents a significant challenge for our training programmes.