Tertiary academic agency in English medium instruction in higher education in Vietnam: a case study

Internationalisation of higher education is an emerging trend around the world, including in Vietnam, where universities are forming global partnerships, enhancing student and staff mobility, and incorporating English as a tool for content delivery to improve global competitiveness and attract international students. As part of internationalisation, English medium instruction (EMI) programs require a great deal of policy and structural changes and support in which tertiary academics play a vital role. Their participation in this process is seen as complex and multilayered, contributing significantly to their professional agency enactment. Academic agency, the interplay between individual efforts, available resources, and contextual and structural factors within EMI programs in non-English-speaking institutions needs further research as little is known about how it functions in the internationalisation context. This doctoral thesis addresses this gap by investigating how academic agency manifests in EMI programs at a tertiary institution in Vietnam. It further explores the factors that facilitate or constrain such agency and examines its broader implications for shaping the teaching and learning environment. Using a qualitative case study approach, the thesis collected data through document analysis, semi-structured interviews with academics, focus-group discussions with students, and class observations. The analysis of this data was guided by the ecological model for agency, which provided a robust theoretical framework for examining the multi-layered dimensions of agency within the EMI context. The thesis makes significant empirical, theoretical, and practical contributions to the understanding and enhancement of academic agency in the internationalisation of higher education. Empirically, the research finds that to enhance their professional growth for educational transformation in an increasingly globalised context, academics enact three types of agency, namely pedagogical agency, relational agency, and reflexive agency, each influenced by individual capacities of academics and contextual factors of their workplace in different ways. While personal capacities considerably affect pedagogical and reflexive agency, broader cultural and structural factors tend to have more impact on relational agency of academics. Moreover, the study finds that affordances for academic agency include essential factors such as networking, interpersonal relationships, and professional learning communities. Conversely, restrictions on agency arise from challenges such as students’ English proficiency, performativity pressures, and rigid communication structures. Theoretically, by adopting the ecological framework to analyse EMI lecturer agency, the study shifts the focus from seeing agency as an inherent capacity to one that is emerging from interactions between such capacity and environmental factors, enriching existing theories by emphasising the complex nature of human agency. Practically, the research provides valuable insights for improving teacher training, professional development, and curriculum design in EMI programs, offering recommendations for policy-makers and institutional leaders to create supportive environments for effective EMI implementation.