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Notwithstanding a considerable amount of literature published on issues related to English as a medium of instruction (EMI) such as stakeholders’ perceptions of EMI benefits and challenges, the impact of EMI on students’ language and academic achievement, and classroom language practices, very few studies have investigated teacher agency in the implementation of EMI policy at the micro level. It is argued that teachers play a critical role in educational change (Fullan 2007). Teachers are considered as primary policymakers who can exercise their agency to implement and respond to national language policy changes which lack clear planning to suit their grassroots level context, instead of being viewed as passive policy recipients in conventional language policy and planning. This echoes a call for more research on teacher agency in different EMI contexts. Drawing on Fullan’s (1993) concept of change agentry, this study seeks to bridge this gap by exploring to what extent content lecturers manifest their capacity to become change agents in response to the change from Vietnamese to English as a medium of instruction in Vietnamese higher education. Research data were based on interviews with fifteen content lecturers and five classroom observations. The findings revealed the vision and agentive actions of local or grassroots level content lecturers in EMI education as active actors who did not seem to passively comply with top-down policies (García and Menken 2010). Instead, they flexibly reinterpreted or reframed them to benefit their students. The study is concluded with implications for teacher agency in the EMI context.
