This study investigates how a Community of Inquiry (CoI) is formed in online English-medium instruction (EMI). EMI scholarship has often treated English as an autonomous medium, while CoI research has largely relied on perception surveys, with limited attention to real-time spoken interaction, especially in multilingual contexts. To address these gaps, we combine the CoI framework (teaching, social, and cognitive presence) with a sociomaterial perspective to conduct a fine-grained discourse analysis of screen-mediated interaction in 4 h of MATLAB programming instruction for engineers, delivered via Microsoft Teams in a Spanish university. We make three contributions. First, we reconceptualize CoI presence from an individual cognitive property to a distributed assemblage achievement, showing how teaching, cognitive, and social presence co-occur through the coordination of talk, tools, and platform affordances. Second, we introduce “medium as assemblage effect”, demonstrating that the “medium” of instruction emerges through sociomaterial configurations rather than being a property of English. Third, we show that English operates under competing centripetal (toward precision) and centrifugal (toward exploratory expression) forces as part of these assemblages. The analysis reveals that all three presence types result from interactional and technological resources, including spoken interaction, shared screens, programming environment, and task-oriented activities. Implications for online EMI practice emphasize the importance of assemblage design.

Keywords

English-medium instruction (EMI) · community of inquiry (CoI) · online synchronous spoken interaction · sociomaterial · assemblage