While full English-medium instruction has been studied extensively since the early 2000s, partial EMI has remained under-theorised despite being widespread. Scholars use overlapping labels such as hybrid, soft, or parallel-language education, often without clear pedagogical definition. Warnby and Bylund define partial EMI precisely: in predominantly non-English settings, it refers to instruction where English is used selectively and required for specific components, is not itself the object of teaching, and yet constitutes a condition for participation. In the Swedish context they examine, this might mean compulsory English-language textbooks within otherwise Swedish-medium courses, or lectures delivered in English while the programme is framed as national-language education. The English components may be explicit, but the linguistic and participatory demands they create often remain tacit.

To understand why this matters, the researchers turned to two established psychological frameworks. Lazarus and Folkman’s transactional model of stress and coping, first published in 1984, defines stress as the product of cognitive appraisal—how individuals interpret demands relative to their coping resources. Primary appraisal concerns whether an encounter is construed as threat, challenge, or harm and loss, while secondary appraisal concerns perceived coping options. Nicholson’s 1990 transition cycle adds a temporal dimension, describing adjustment to new roles through four phases: preparation, encounter, adjustment, and stabilisation. By combining these frameworks, the authors link moment-to-moment appraisal of English-medium demands to longer trajectories of adaptation, showing why adjustment may stall or be repeatedly reactivated across courses.

The conceptual argument is illustrated through four retrospective interview accounts from novice students in Swedish higher education, all pseudonymous and all recruited from a previous upper-secondary research project. Each participant had passed English 6, the final compulsory English course for university eligibility in Sweden, and had completed the optional English 7 course—representing the maximum school-based preparation for academic English available in the country. All were enrolled in Swedish-medium university programmes with selected components in English and were in their second to fourth semester. Semi-structured interviews of roughly thirty minutes were conducted in Swedish in spring 2023, transcribed, and translated into English for analysis through a theory-informed interpretive reading.

The accounts reveal striking patterns of appraisal. Moa, a first-year engineering student, repeatedly described English academic readings as a wall of text, saying it felt like a leap or a shock. Although she had performed well in English at school, university texts seemed fundamentally unmanageable—a dual appraisal of threat, through perceived overload, and harm or loss, through the destabilisation of previously assumed academic competence. Alicia, a first-year medical student, described a clash between the casual English texts of upper-secondary school and the dense, abstract language of university material, a failed expectancy that prompted reappraisal of her own preparedness. Einar, a civil engineering student, recalled that the biggest shock was that many lectures were in English, and that he eventually stopped attending a statistics course because he simply could not understand anything.

Perhaps most striking is the case of Leia, a social science student whose threat appraisal arose before she even enrolled. After previewing the English-language literature of a programme she had been accepted to, she felt overwhelmed and withdrew, recalling that she tried to get into the reading but it just did not work. In the researchers’ reading, this anticipatory withdrawal occurred in the preparation phase of Nicholson’s cycle, showing that English-medium demands can become consequential before formal entry to university. Leia’s decision illustrates how tacit language expectations may affect perceived access to higher education itself—not through exclusion at the gate, but through unequal conditions that surface only once students attempt to participate.

The students’ coping efforts fell into four overlapping forms. The first was adapting through effort: Leia allocated twice as much time for English readings, Alicia turned to Google Translate and Swedish-language notes when lectures proved insufficient, and Moa abandoned linear reading in favour of selecting passages, highlighting, and translating key terms. The second was avoiding and withdrawing: Einar substituted English lectures with self-study, online tutorials, and YouTube lectures, while Moa described moments of nearly giving up when sentence after sentence defied comprehension. The third was reframing, enduring, and improvising: Einar spoke of fighting his way through material until it stuck, and Leia gradually moved from translating individual words to investigating how concepts were used across disciplinary texts. The fourth was seeking recognition and informal solidarity—peer conversations that reframed English difficulty as shared rather than a personal failing, and appeals to instructors for acknowledgement.

Recognition emerged as a decisive but uneven factor. Alicia described lecturers whose slides included small Swedish translations of key terms alongside others who offered no help at all, noting that many lecturers spoke only English, making questions difficult to ask. Einar appreciated a glossary provided in his first mathematics course but noted its absence later, and argued that the most important thing was that examiners acknowledge that the demands are difficult and new. In the researchers’ analysis, such sporadic support points to fragile adjustment sustained by piecemeal aids, and to institutional silence around English-medium difficulty at programme level. When recognition depends on individual goodwill, coping remains fragile and unevenly distributed.

The study’s central contribution is conceptual rather than empirical. First, it sharpens the definition of partial EMI by framing selective English demands as participation conditions within national-language programmes. Second, it reframes familiar practices—translation, selective reading, lecture avoidance, peer reliance—as appraisal-linked coping responses rather than isolated study strategies. Third, it conceptualises participation in partial EMI as recursive rather than linear: each new English-language text, lecture, or assessment can reactivate earlier appraisals, complicating movement from encounter to adjustment and stabilisation. Moa’s complaint that students must learn two things when they should only have to learn one captures the double burden, as linguistic demands divert time, energy, and strength away from disciplinary content itself.

The equity implications reach beyond Sweden. In a country where widening participation and formal equality of access are central policy goals, the authors argue that inequity may emerge less through exclusion at entry than through unequal conditions for participation after enrolment. When English appears selectively without consistent institutional recognition, responsibility for adaptation shifts onto individual students, and prior access to academic English shapes how easily they adjust—turning partial EMI into a hidden curriculum. The researchers stress that their argument is not for lowering English requirements or making university easy, but for making selective English-medium demands visible from admission onwards, scaffolding them across the curriculum through explicit reading guidance, glossaries, and bilingual terminology support, and institutionalising recognition so that support does not depend on individual lecturers. Resilience, they conclude, cannot be the foundation of programme design: if institutions wish to benefit from English-medium resources, they must also accept responsibility for the demands these create. The authors note that their contribution is conceptual, based on four illustrative accounts, and call for future research across institutional contexts, comparisons with self-selected full-EMI programmes, and longitudinal follow-up of how scaffolding responsibilities are distributed in multilingual higher education.

Subject of Research: Partial English-medium instruction as a tacit participation condition shaping student appraisal, coping, and transition in higher education

Article Title: Partial English-medium instruction as a participation condition: appraisal, coping, and transition in higher education

Article References: Warnby, M., & Bylund, J. (2026). Partial English-medium instruction as a participation condition: appraisal, coping, and transition in higher education. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01766-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01766-3

Keywords: English-medium instruction, partial EMI, higher education, student transition, stress and coping, cognitive appraisal, equity, multilingualism, academic reading, hidden curriculum, Swedish higher education, language policy

The research, published in the journal Discover Social Science and Health, was conducted by Gideon Tetteh Agormedah, Edmond Kwesi Agormedah, and Samuel Kwarteng of the Department of Business and Social Sciences Education. The team set out to determine whether emotional intelligence, often abbreviated as EI, predicts the level of teaching anxiety experienced by preservice business teachers during their practicum, and whether gender changes the strength of that relationship. Their findings point to a clear conclusion: emotional intelligence does influence teaching anxiety, and the effect holds regardless of whether the trainee is a man or a woman.

To understand why this matters, it helps to unpack the theoretical scaffolding the researchers chose. The study is grounded in the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping, a framework originally developed by psychologists Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman in the 1980s. The model holds that stress is not simply a property of demanding situations, nor purely a feature of individual temperament. Instead, stress emerges from a transaction between the person and the environment: first, the individual appraises whether a situation threatens their well-being, and second, they appraise what resources they have to cope with it. A practicum classroom can therefore be read by one trainee as an intolerable threat and by another as a challenging but manageable task, depending on the cognitive and emotional resources each brings to the encounter.

Emotional intelligence fits into this model as exactly such a resource. Broadly, EI refers to the capacity to perceive, understand, regulate, and use emotions, both one’s own and those of other people. A trainee teacher high in EI can recognize the physical signs of their own rising panic, reframe a hostile-looking classroom as a normal feature of adolescent behavior, and modulate their emotional response before it spirals into full anxiety. A trainee low in EI, by contrast, may experience the same classroom events as an escalating series of threats with no obvious coping route. In transactional terms, EI shapes the secondary appraisal, the assessment of coping resources, and thereby determines how much stress the practicum ultimately produces.

The researchers tested this logic with an explanatory correlational cross-sectional design. Rather than sampling a subset of the population, they used a census approach, enrolling all 107 preservice business teachers available to the study, a group preparing to teach accounting and management subjects. Data were collected through a closed-ended structured questionnaire, a format that allows respondents to rate their emotional intelligence and their teaching anxiety on fixed scales and permits statistical comparison across the whole group. Because every member of the population was included, the study avoids the sampling bias that can creep in when only volunteers or easily reachable students participate.

The analysis proceeded in two statistical stages. First, the team used linear regression to test whether emotional intelligence scores predicted teaching anxiety levels during the practicum. Regression analysis estimates the direction and strength of the relationship between a predictor variable and an outcome, allowing researchers to ask whether higher EI is systematically associated with lower anxiety. Second, and more subtly, the researchers employed the PROCESS moderation procedure developed by statistician Andrew Hayes, a widely used tool for testing whether a third variable changes the strength or direction of a relationship between two others. Here, the third variable was gender. The question was not whether men and women differ in anxiety on average, but whether the protective effect of emotional intelligence operates differently for each gender.

The results answered both questions. Emotional intelligence did significantly influence the level of teaching anxiety reported by the preservice business teachers, consistent with the transactional prediction that stronger emotional coping resources should buffer the stress of the practicum. Yet the moderation analysis returned a null result: gender did not moderate the relationship. In other words, the anxiety-reducing benefit of emotional intelligence appears to operate similarly for male and female trainees. This finding is notable because much of the literature on teaching anxiety has documented gender differences in self-reported anxiety, and one might have expected the coping mechanism to work differently across genders. The Cape Coast data suggest that the underlying psychological machinery is shared.

There are technical caveats worth keeping in view. A cross-sectional design captures a single moment in time, so it can establish that EI and anxiety are related as theory predicts, but it cannot prove that emotional intelligence causes lower anxiety; it is at least conceivable that less anxious trainees find it easier to report high emotional competence. The modest sample of 107 participants, while a complete census of its population, is small by the standards of moderation analysis, and null moderation findings can sometimes reflect limited statistical power rather than a true absence of effect. Self-report questionnaires, meanwhile, depend on respondents’ willingness and ability to describe their own emotional lives accurately. None of these limitations undermines the study’s core contribution, but they mark the boundaries within which its conclusions should be read.

The practical implications, however, reach well beyond the statistical tables. Teacher education programs in many countries devote extensive time to subject-matter knowledge and pedagogical technique, while treating the emotional demands of teaching as something trainees will simply absorb through experience. The Ghanaian researchers argue that this passive approach should change. Their central recommendation is that stakeholders in teacher education be intentional about incorporating structured emotional intelligence development into the preparation of future business teachers, so that trainees enter the practicum equipped to manage the emotional pressures it generates. Structured EI development can take many forms, from explicit instruction in emotion recognition and regulation to supervised reflection on stressful classroom episodes, role-play exercises, and peer-support structures that normalize anxiety rather than stigmatize it.

The focus on business teachers is itself significant. Preservice accounting and management teachers occupy a distinctive niche: they must translate technical, often abstract content into engaging lessons while managing classrooms that may regard their subject as dry or intimidating. That combination of content-delivery pressure and classroom-management demand makes the practicum an especially potent stressor for this group, and it makes the finding that EI buffers their anxiety particularly actionable. If emotional competence can be built before trainees ever face their first class, the practicum could shift from a trial by fire into a genuinely formative experience.

More broadly, the study adds to a growing body of evidence that the emotional dimension of teaching is not a soft afterthought but a core professional competency. The Transactional Model of Stress and Coping reminds us that the same classroom can be experienced as threat or challenge depending on the appraisals a teacher brings to it, and emotional intelligence is one of the few trainable resources that shapes those appraisals directly. The Cape Coast team’s finding that this resource works across genders simplifies the intervention problem: teacher educators do not need gender-specific emotional training tracks, only well-designed programs that raise EI for everyone. As education systems worldwide grapple with teacher attrition and burnout, evidence that a trainable psychological skill can reduce the anxiety of the very first teaching experience offers a promising, and refreshingly practical, point of intervention. The study, published open access with a permanent DOI, invites teacher educators everywhere to ask whether their programs are teaching the emotional curriculum as seriously as the academic one.

Subject of Research: The relationship between emotional intelligence and teaching practicum anxiety among preservice business teachers

Article Title: Emotional intelligence and teaching practicum anxiety in preservice business teachers across gender differences

Article References: Agormedah, G. T., Agormedah, E. K., & Kwarteng, S. (2026). Emotional intelligence and teaching practicum anxiety in preservice business teachers across gender differences. Discover Social Science and Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44155-026-00472-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44155-026-00472-w

Keywords: emotional intelligence, teaching anxiety, teaching practicum, preservice teachers, business education, teacher education, stress and coping, Transactional Model of Stress and Coping, gender differences, Ghana, moderation analysis, teacher training