Teaching across Language and Identity: The Lived Experiences of Three EMI Lecturers in Italy

This paper examines the lived experiences of three Educational Linguistics lecturers navigating English Medium Instruction (EMI) in Italy. Far from a neutral pedagogical shift, EMI emerges as a site of emotional tensions, linguistic self-surveillance, and identity reconfiguration. Using a phenomenological lens, the study explores how these lecturers negotiate their professional selves amid persistent native-speakerist ideologies shaping perceptions of competence and legitimacy. Their narratives reveal a deep entanglement between language and emotion: pride, anxiety, resilience, and doubt surface not as contradictions but as constitutive elements of teaching through English. A central tension lies in the incommensurability between their identities in English and Italian, an unresolved dissonance that becomes a space of learning, discomfort, and transformation. Situated in a field historically aligned with Anglophone norms, these reflections invite a rethinking of Educational Linguistics, foregrounding how linguistic ideologies in EMI are not only taught or resisted, but felt, embodied, and lived.