Integrating World Englishes in English-Medium Instruction: A Systematic Literature Review for Inclusive Pedagogy

Paper · 2026 · Faiza Hawa, Rohmatillah, Basikin Basikin et al.

Summary

English-medium instruction (EMI) is spreading quickly in universities, especially in outer- and expanding-circle countries. Yet teaching often still treats native-speaker English as the only legitimate target. The authors ask how the World Englishes (WE) perspective, which treats the many regional and lingua franca forms of English as valid, has actually entered EMI practice. They ran a Systematic Literature Review following PRISMA. Searches went through Google Scholar using the Publish or Perish tool with Boolean keyword combinations. Candidates passed through identification, screening, eligibility and inclusion, leaving 22 studies from 2014–2025, each coded on a data extraction sheet. Three questions guided the synthesis: obstacles, perceptions, and pedagogical consequences. The main barriers turn out to be ideological and institutional, chiefly native-speakerism and thin lecturer training. At the same time, acceptance of varied Englishes is growing, notably in intercultural settings. The authors recommend translanguaging, locally fitted curricula and stronger intercultural competence among teachers. They frame WE integration as a matter of equity, not just proficiency.

Key points

Corpus: 22 articles published 2014–2025, retrieved via Google Scholar with Publish or Perish. Search terms included "English-Medium Instruction", "World Englishes", "ELF", "teacher perception", "student attitude" and "higher education".
Method: PRISMA (Moher et al. 2009; Page et al. 2021) with four stages. An extraction sheet recorded each study's aim, geographic setting, methodology and main findings.
Three research questions: challenges for lecturers and institutions, lecturer and student perceptions of WE relevance, and implications for teaching, materials and interaction.
Perception gap: some lecturers regard non-standard varieties as deficiencies, while many students adapt readily to unfamiliar accents and multicultural communication.
Recommendations: translanguaging strategies, context-sensitive curricula, and teacher development in intercultural competence.

Interesting ideas

I1. Treat a non-native or regional variant as a legitimate system rather than a defect to be corrected; this avoids penalising competent users whose English differs from the reference norm.
I2. A staged funnel (identify → screen → check eligibility → include) with a fixed extraction sheet per item makes every inclusion decision auditable and reproducible.
I3. Comparing how two groups (lecturers vs students) judge the same language exposes where a "standard" reflects one group's ideology rather than communicative success.
I4. Reframing a multilingual classroom as a source of resources rather than a site of deficit shifts the evaluation question from "is it standard?" to "did communication succeed?".

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

I1 (tokens): Let the tagger and lemmatizer accept documented World English forms as valid variants instead of flagging them as errors or unknown tokens.
I2 (learn): Run silver-data curation as explicit logged stages, recording why each sentence was kept or dropped, so data selection itself stays explainable.
I3 (learn): When witness parsers or LLM teacher tiers disagree on variety-specific constructions, examine whether the disagreement reflects norm bias before majority-voting it away.
I4 (answer): Judge reader answers to inputs written in varied Englishes by whether the meaning was recovered correctly, not by surface conformity to one dialect.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Institutions

🎓Monash UniversityMelbourne ·

Australia60 works · 54,866 citations

Also on the byline: Yogyakarta State University.

Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3Arts and Humanities · 16,039 works Language and Linguistics · 15,891 works Literature and Literary Theory · 519 works

🧭 Topics 1English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Faiza Hawa, Rohmatillah, Basikin Basikin, Dyah Setyowati Ciptaningrum and Adjie Pradana Wibowo. 2026. Integrating World Englishes in English-Medium Instruction: A Systematic Literature Review for Inclusive Pedagogy. Journal of Languages and Language Teaching 14.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.33394/jollt.v14i2.19190

@article{hawa2026integrating,
  title = {{Integrating World Englishes in English-Medium Instruction: A Systematic Literature Review for Inclusive Pedagogy}},
  author = {Faiza Hawa, Rohmatillah, Basikin Basikin, Dyah Setyowati Ciptaningrum and Adjie Pradana Wibowo},
  journal = {Journal of Languages and Language Teaching 14},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.33394/jollt.v14i2.19190},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.33394/jollt.v14i2.19190}
}

References

6 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

How to cite: Hawa, Faiza., Rohmatillah., Basikin., Ciptaningrum, D.S., & Wibowo, A.P. (2026). Integrating World Englishes in English-Medium Instruction: A Systematic Literature Review for Inclusive Pedagogy. JOLLT Journal of Languages and Language Teaching. 14(2). 653-665. Doi: https://doi.org/10.33394/jollt.v14i2.19190 ↗
INTRODUCTION English as a Medium Instruction (EMI) has been a major issue in global higher education for the last 20 years. The emergence of this pedagogical strategy is a key strategy for globalizing universities, planning to enhance international competitiveness, extending transnational academic collaboration, and strengthening students’ skills for communicating in international landscape (Kim et al., 2018; Diezmas & Barrera, 2021; Nagao & Chen, 2025). find
The integration of EMI not only offers novel opportunity for learning quality enhancement, but also introduce complex challenges concerning to language ideology, institutional policy, and pedagogical activities (Curle et al., 2024; Fang & Baker, 2021). In nations belong to outer and expanding circle, where English is a second language, the application of EMI exposes substantial linguistic and sociocultural dynamics. In various non-native settings, EMI is influenced by universal competitiveness, international positions, and mobility agendas, which frequently intensify native speaker standards. This dynamic causes pressure between the pluricentric nature of English employment and the normative standards rooted in institutional practices. Mapping this pressure gives a more vivid analytical framework for comprehending the intersections of language ideology, policy, and pedagogy in EMI settings. The adoption of English as a primary device of instruction is often functioned to uphold institutional notoriety and international mobility. However, practically, it often fails to agree with local realities. For example, Asia and Middle East educational institutions are facing difficulties between globalization demands and the necessities to conserve the identity of national linguistic (Khramchenko, 2025; Zhou et al., 2025; Sukjairungwattana et al., 2024). Research signifies that applying English-Medium Instruction by overlooking human resource preparation worsen the void of academic achievement and social dynamics in universities (Farooq, 2019 ;Ramírez & Angel, 2022; Dong & Han, 2025). A comparable phenomenon can be noticed throughout Europe by applying parallel language policies in countries of Nordic territory. This strategy seeks to manage a balance between the use of English and national languages in academic activities (Hultgren, 2018; Taylor, 2018; Orduna-nocito & Sánchez-García, 2022). Nevertheless, in practice, pressures continue between the internationalization goal and the need to safeguard integrity of local culture. In various settings, EMI policies include not just language options, but social and political activities as well, demanding a multifaceted comprehension (Hopkyns et al., 2025; Fang, 2025). The World Englishes (WE) idea provides a novel framework for grasping diverse English forms and functions globally. This point of view dismisses massive view of English genuineness and highlights the legitimacy of its universal versions emerging from engagements among speakers in various situations (Fang & Baker, 2021; Yuan et al., 2024). The WE framework reinforces the concept of using English as global lingua franca influenced by multilingual and intercultural activities. WE incorporated into EMI settings can promote greater equity, reflection, and participation in learning contexts (Galloway & Ruegg, 2020). WE-informed pedagogical approaches enable lecturers and students to use their language resources through strategies such as translanguaging, various accents integration, and advancement of culturally adaptive curricula (Nguyen et al., 2025; Tai, 2023). The existing research further show that understanding English pluralism improves effective learning, enthusiasm, and intercultural ability among students (Gu et al., 2024). This study strengthens the current research by reconceptualizing multilingual and multi cultural classroom as rooms of epistemic and communicative plethora rather than sites of language insufficiency. The main focus is no longer how to fix students’ English but is shifted to reframing English norms in varied academic circles. However, systematic reviews by Curle et al. (2024) and Macaro et al. (2018) demonstrate that English as a Medium Instruction (EMI) studies continues to be mostly governed by the framework of English as a Native Language (ENL) and native-speakerism concept. Consequently, methods based on World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca have got inadequate attention. The excessive focus on linguistic results and students’ achievement has obscured the ideological, institutional, and pedagogical scopes of EMI application (Ahmed, 2025; Goodman et al., 2024; Xu & Gibbons, 2025). Hence, the purpose of this study is to conduct a Systemic Literature Review (SLR) covering both empirical and conceptual research regarding the incorporation of World Englishes point of view within EMI in higher education level. This synthesizes findings from the preceding two decades to frame research trajectory, challenges implementation, and pedagogical suggestions. Particularly, this study pursues information dealing with primary challenges encountered by lecturers and institutions in incorporating World Englishes within EMI in higher education, and the perceptions of the lecturers and students toward pedagogical pertinence of World Englishes in EMI practice, and pedagogical implications of World Englishes integration into teaching activities, material plan, and classroom interaction within the context of EMI. Eventually, this review has significant contribution to the development of a World Englishes-informed EMI pedagogy that fosters linguistic variety and social equity while giving guidance for lecturers and policy makers in proposing modified learning strategies that accommodate local needs with global importunity (Curle et al., 2024; Fang & Baker, 2021; Galloway & Ruegg, 2020). This study is meant to figure out how preceding researches have incorporated the World Englishes point of view within English-Medium Instruction (EMI) instruction in higher education, and to investigate the influences of the integration within teaching practices, students’ and lecturers’ perspectives, and institutional policies. Through systemic review of 22 articles published between 2014-2025, most studies have mainly concentrated on the EMI aspects of language and institutional, its deeper ideological aspects and pedagogical implications are underexplored (Fang & Baker, 2021; Galloway & Ruegg, 2020; Qiu et al., 2024). The core issue of implementing English-Medium Instruction arises from pressures between native-English speakers’ ideologies and different language realities in the classroom. Schools frequently struggle with low lecturer training and extrinsic tension forcing from universal standard that diminish linguistics variety. These results emphasizes a void between academic globalization concept and students’ local need (Curle et al., 2024; Hammou & Kesbi, 2023). Other research (Goodman et al., 2024; Tai, 2023) strengthen the previous statement by claiming that lecturers’ and students’ point of view significantly becomes dominant factor toward the success of EMI implementation. While, a number of lecturers reckon nonstandard English varieties as linguistic inadequacies, many students show adaptive behaviour toward distinctive accents and multicultural communication. This discrepancy highlights the need to bolster pedagogical awareness rooted in the World Englishes principles. Moreover, studies from (Akıncıoğlu, 2025; Macaro et al., 2018; Muttaqin & Chuang, 2022) demonstrate that the integration of World Englishes and English-Medium Instruction significantly transform teaching method, curriculum plan, and classroom dynamic. World Englishes-based approaches foster the employment of translanguaging, improve intercultural ability, and establish inclusivity and reflectivity of the learning environment that treasure students’ linguistic identities. Consequently, this study is designed as Systemic Literature Review (SLR) to address these three research questions emerge from these gaps: 1. What are the main challenges faced by lecturers and institutions in integrating the perspectives of World Englishes into English-Medium Instruction in higher education? 2. What are the lecturers’ and students’ perceptions toward the pedagogical relevance of World Englishes in EMI classrooms? 3. What are the pedagogical implications of incorporating World Englishes into teaching activities, material plan, and classroom interaction within EMI contexts? find
RESEARCH METHOD Research Design This research applied the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach to investigate, assess, and synthesize prior studies regarding the application of World Englishes (WE) within English as a Medium Instruction in higher education contexts. This approach was chosen to offer an extensive understanding of recent research trends, theoretical advancements, and the current issues and gaps in the domain (Curle et al., 2024; Fang & Baker, 2021). By this systematic approach, SLR promises that the emerging conclusions include reliability and relevancy. Given that the integration of WE into EMI is still scarce in terms of its theory and implementation, a systematic synthesis is well suited to expose gaps in empirical evidence and emphasizes the areas requiring conceptual alignment. In this regard, SLR does more than summarizing the existing research; it establishes a systematic groundwork for promoting the field toward more inclusive and context-sensitive EMI practices. The SLR procedures adhered to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines as proposed by Moher et al. (2009). To examine articles alligned with the inclusion, data extraction sheet was employed to log crucial information such as research goal, geographical setting, research methdology, and primary research findings from each of the article that complied with the inclusion standard. The review process of this study underwent systematic process involving four main steps named identification, screening, elgibility, and inclusion to dislodge bias and improve study rigor (Page et al., 2021). find
Data Analysis Identification Stage There were three phases involved in identification stage. First, researchers searched scholarly articles published between 2014 to 2025 via Google Scholar using an aid from Publish and Perish application. Limitation of the articles’ year of publication was meant to assure the focus of this recent research. In the second phase, the researchers used Boolean operators (AND, OR) and keywords to get the articles: “English-Medium Instruction,” “World Englishes,” “teacher perception,” “student attitude,” “ELF,” and “higher education.” Last, the researchers obtained 87 potentially pertinent articles from the search. 11 duplicate articles were removed and 9 irrelevant articles were dropped down. The remain 67 articles was continued for further screening. Details of initial search strategy are portrayed in Table 1. find

Updated 29 October 2026

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