Coping with English: students' perceptions of their teachers' linguistic competence in undergraduate science teaching

This paper addresses the question of how undergraduate students negotiate linguistic competence of their university lecturers following the switch of the classroom medium of instruction from German to English. Emphasizing the concept of intersubjectivity in classroom communities of practice, this paper aims at revealing interpretative repertoires underlying the students' display of the lecturers' communicative behaviour. Discussing selected scenes from two science lectures with undergraduate students, the paper shows that the successful implementation of English‐medium instruction crucially depends on the lecturers' ability to negotiate communicative‐didactic rather than linguistic competence.