Making visible ‘hidden’ intentions and potential choices: international students in intercultural communication

The study reported in this paper examines the experiences of Chinese and Vietnamese international students in engaging in their institutional written discourse at an Australian university. The study highlights the significance of exploring the real accounts of the students as the ‘insiders’ and uncovering students’ individual potential choices and intentions as their ‘seemingly unrecognized’ values in producing their own texts in English as a second language. In particular, based on international students’ reflection on their intentions and potential choices in academic practices, the study signals how the taken-for-granted institutional conventions may contribute to silencing or marginalizing the possibilities for alternative approaches to knowledge and communication within the higher education institutional context

'Academic Literacies' Research as Pedagogy: Dialogues of Participation

About the book: Academic Writing is emerging as a distinct subject for teaching and research in higher education in the UK and elsewhere. Teaching Academic Writing in UK Higher Education introduces this growing field and provides a resource for university teachers, researchers and administrators interested in developing students' writing

Strange new world: applying a Bourdieuian lens to understanding early student experiences in higher education

Occupational therapy pre-registration education stands at the intersection of the fields of health and social care and higher education. UK Government agendas in both fields have seen an increase in the number of students entering with non-traditional academic backgrounds, a group noted to experience particular challenges in negotiating the transition to, and persisting and succeeding within, higher education. Drawing on data from an ongoing longitudinal case study, a Bourdieuian lens is applied to exploring the early educational experiences of a group of these students during their first year of study and highlights a number of key issues, including the high-value status of linguistic capital and its relationship to understanding the rules governing practices within the learning environment, the processes via which students manage to adapt to or interestingly, to resist, the dominant culture of the field, and some of the barriers to finding a foothold and legitimate position within the new fiel