The Hidden English Requirement: How Unplanned Language Demands Reshape University Transition

Across universities in non-English-speaking countries, English has quietly become part of everyday study even in degree programmes that are officially taught in the national language. A new conceptual study from the University of Gothenburg, published in the journal Higher Education, argues that this selective use of English—known as partial English-medium instruction, or partial EMI—functions as a hidden condition for participation in higher education. Students who never signed up for an English-taught programme may nonetheless find that compulsory readings, lecture slides, examinations, and occasional lectures arrive in English, without prior notice, scaffolding, or institutional recognition. The researchers, Marcus Warnby and Jasmine Bylund, suggest that these tacit demands can be psychologically and temporally consequential, shaping how novice students appraise their studies, cope with stress, and move through the transition into university life.

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