English has penetrated virtually all domains of the Arabian Gulf, acting as a de facto second official language after Arabic and a lingua franca for international and interethnic communication (Hillman & Ocampo Eibenschutz, 2018). Concurrently, the spread of global neoliberalism and with it, the adoption of Western “travelling policies” (Phan, 2017, p. 12) including building “knowledge-based economies” and monolingual language policies has resulted in the rapid growth of English Medium Instruction (EMI) in schools and universities in the Gulf (Barnawi, 2017). This has led to competition and rivalry between English and Arabic-medium education (Reynolds, 2019) and concerns about the impact of EMI and the spread of global English on the attrition of Arabic literacy, culture and identity in the region (Al-Issa & Dahan, 2011; Mahboob & Elyas, 2017). In this presentation, we compare studies on EMI policies and practices across three different Gulf states—the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. After providing a brief overview of the development of EMI educational language policies within each setting, we present the results of a systematic review of the literature on EMI in these three countries. Our review is guided by the following research questions: 1) What are the perceptions and attitudes towards EMI policies in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia? 2) Which ideologies about language education are most dominant in the EMI literature in these countries? 3) What are the similarities and differences among these three Gulf states in terms of attitudes and ideologies towards EMI? What factors contribute to these similarities or differences? We discuss both the challenges and the possibilities of moving away from monolingual ideologies and policies towards more plurilingual pedagogies in the Gulf.
