‘Sank you’ or ‘thank you’? Negotiating epistemic authority and communicative enoughness among international students in a Chinese EMI programme

Informed by the theoretical concepts of ‘epistemic authority’ and ‘enoughness’, this study explores how international students in a Chinese EMI programme perceive their teachers’ English proficiency. Drawing on ethnographic data from classroom observations and interviews with a cohort of international students, the study analyzes how Chinese teachers’ English accents, lexical choices, pronunciation errors, and pragmatic infelicities become sites of humour and ideological negotiation. Findings reveal three themes: (i) humour and laughter serve as negotiations of epistemic authority, enabling international students to comment on and contest teachers’ linguistic performances; (ii) pronunciation and lexical choices act as markers of enoughness, shaping perceptions of legitimacy and communicative adequacy in EMI classrooms; and (iii) teachers reclaim epistemic authority through pedagogical practice, using adaptive strategies such as clarification, scaffolding, and individualised support to restore legitimacy and ensure comprehension. We argue that international students’ language ideologies both reinforce and challenge existing hierarchies of epistemic authority, and we call for a more nuanced understanding of competence in EMI contexts that moves beyond deficit framings. Pedagogical implications include supporting EMI teachers’ adaptive practices for reclaiming authority while engaging international students in reflexive dialogue about English variation, communicative enoughness, and epistemic justice in higher education.