Advancing CLIL approaches in EMI settings through international collaboration: An introduction

CLIL, which stands for Content and Language Integrated Learning, is an instructional approach that gives ample curricular and pedagogical attention to content and language outcomes in multilingual educational settings. Increasingly, it is heralded as a way to responsibly enact top-down English-Mediumof-Instruction (EMI) policies at the university level, where teachers and students are tasked with developing their English proficiency while remaining competitive in the international job market. However, teachers and teacher educators hoping to implement this approach in their science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) content courses face significant challenges. This article serves as an introduction to a guest-edited special issue that reports on several aspects related to a project of international collaboration called Project SCILLA, an acronym for “STEM Content Integrated with Language-Learning Activities”. We first provide a brief overview of the project, which was developed and carried out in collaboration between Michigan State University and a consortium of 10 rural universities in Kazakhstan as a way to support STEM educators who wish to adapt their teaching practices to Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Education. We then offer an overview of the six articles that comprise the special issue, and call for deliberate and dialogic international collaboration as a way to support teachers responding to language policy demands. Copyright © 2025 BFSU, FLTRP, Walter de Gruyter, Cultural and Education Section British Embassy.