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2 Tracing a Student Journey: The Stories of Mai and Lin

In telling the stories of two students, Mai and Lin, I hope to create ‘red thread’ narratives of two student participants that weave through the rest of the thematic data presented in following chapters. In presenting this data, I try to use the students’ own words as much as possible whilst providing my own understanding and interpretation of the background and context that created their own particular circumstances. I have chosen, from the many students I spoke to, to highlight the stories of Mai and Lin for a number of reasons.

Firstly, there are clear external parallels between their journeys. Both students were female and from mainland China. Neither had travelled outside China prior to the commencement of their studies in the UK. Both had only recently completed their undergraduate degree in China but had done some volunteer work within their chosen fields – Mai as a teacher within her discipline and Lin producing marketing materials for her province’s internal tourism campaign. Both students attended a pre-sessional in the EAP unit prior to beginning their TPG programme, needing to do so in order to meet the language requirement of their academic programme because they had not met the overall 6.5 in IELTS requirement stipulated by their School’s admissions policy.

The second reason for choosing these two students are the differences between them, the most obvious one being that they were studying in different Schools and different disciplines. While I am not suggesting that these two individuals can represent the experience of all students, or even all International or Chinese students in these different sites, their stories do highlight some of the conflicting tensions and possibilities that surround approaches to teaching and learning in an increasingly diverse higher education landscape. I have attempted to represent both students as unique individuals while drawing on key elements of their stories that represent the tensions within the internationalised higher education system. Remaining conscious of the ‘danger of a single story’ (Adichie, 2009), I have attempted to consider the story of the students’ journeys from multiple perspectives, questioning motives, reasons and outcomes. I am confident that readers will recognise and be able to draw parallels between these stories and the stories of students they have encountered in their own teaching contexts. I begin with Mai’s story.

Mai

Mai’s story highlights the complex tensions involved in one individual student’s situation as they struggle, and ultimately fail, to meet the expected academic and communication standards of their taught post-graduate academic programme. Through her story I hope to show that this failure cannot be attributed to one incident, to one breakdown in support systems, to a language deficit, a culture or educational system in isolation, or even to luck. Rather, each student experiences, succeeds or fails as a result of a unique and nuanced combination of factors. We need to consider these factors holistically; by breaking them down and trying to fix one aspect that we identify as being broken, we inevitably shift a problem onto a new or different area.

Mai began studying at my institution in January 2016. She arrived with a relatively low IELTS score, 5.0 overall, and had chosen to study in the United Kingdom for a year in order to develop her academic English via a longer pre-sessional programme rather than stay in China and continue to take repeated IELTS tests. She had had an offer to join her chosen TPG programme in the previous academic year which she had chosen to defer, I assume because she had not met the language requirement within the offer. She studied in the EAP teaching unit over three 10-week terms. At the end of each term, she submitted assessments and took part in tests which would allow her to progress to the next level of pre-sessional study. These assessments were intended to provide formative feedback to students that would enable them to learn and apply this learning as they moved onto the following terms of study, but also to provide an indication of their current language proficiency. The criteria used for the language element of the assessment was carefully mapped against both the CEFR and IELTS as these are the current most widely accepted units of measurement for language proficiency in the UK. Criteria also focused on the extent to which a student was able to fulfil the literacy and communication requirements of a specific academic task.

Mai struggled at each assessment point and progressed to the next level of pre-sessional with clear and strong warnings that she would find the following term difficult and may want to reconsider her choices and options for future study. All of the EAP teachers who were involved in working with Mai expressed at some point their belief that she would struggle with her chosen TPG programme and that she did not currently have the academic attributes that would enable her to succeed. Despite this, when measured against the criteria which were primarily focused on general academic language proficiency, Mai continued to progress towards her final goal of joining her TPG programme.

Having studied on three terms of English for general academic purposes (EGAP), for the summer, Mai was placed on a pre-sessional programme that was focused specifically on STEM disciplines. This was the first year that this STEM pre-sessional had run and the programme leader had reported difficulties in creating a cohesive programme that covered the needs of a still wide-ranging set of TPG programmes, covering five different faculties. The majority of the students on this pre-sessional were moving onto engineering programmes or food science and nutrition. Therefore, this is where the majority of the content focus was aimed. Mai was the only student on the pre-sessional who was going onto her specific programme, with only two other students moving into her Faculty.

Again, Mai met the expected level of proficiency at the end of programme, scoring 56 overall and no less than 55 in any of the components, with the standard expected level being 55 for students who, like Mai, were required to demonstrate a language proficiency level of IELTS 6.5 or equivalent in all four skills. Mai was allowed to join her chosen TPG programme, with the suggestion that she might want to consider continuing to develop her EAP skills by joining a general insessional programme. At the time, this insessional programme ran in four-week blocks of two hours per week, with students being asked to select the area of EAP they felt they most needed to focus on, the choices being: Academic Writing; Academic Reading and Critical Thinking; Academic Language Development; Academic Lecture and Seminar Skills; Academic Speaking and Presentation Skills; Grammar for Academic Writing. However, there was no absolute requirement either that the School act on this suggestion, or that Mai enrol for any of the classes provided. Frequently, timetable clashes would prevent Mai or any other student from being able to attend their class of choice.

The School that Mai had joined had very few structural links or connections with the EAP teaching unit. However, over the summer I had begun to have conversations with the Faculty’s Student Education Service Manager and an academic member of staff who had taken on responsibility for all international students within the Faculty. The Faculty had very recently begun to consider the best ways to support international students, and I was being asked for advice around the development of a Faculty run series of classes for undergraduate students that would provide them with extra support around academic expectations. As a result of this contact, I was sent an email in early November with the following message from Mai’s programme leader and personal tutor:

• I have just marked her X piece and it is completely incomprehensible. I think her English is at such a poor level she does not understand anything. She has been in two coursework surgeries with me where she has said nothing and written very little and only spoken when asked a direct question. I spoke to her afterwards and she finds it difficult to understand what we say. She had a copy of the paper we were working on and she had made notes in Chinese all over it. She did not understand the (written) instructions for the flow diagram so did not bring a draft to the second coursework surgery and then when she sent me her draft it was clear she didn’t understand what she was being asked to do, despite having sat through the two CW surgeries where we discussed the figures and the other students presented their drafts which we discussed. I had a personal tutorial with her and advised her to get more support through the language centre but I don’t think this will be enough. She came through the presessional English course so I don’t know how her English can be so bad but I really don’t think she is going to be able to cope. (S3)

Analysis of the content of this email highlights multiple intersecting and contradictory threads that I will return to repeatedly throughout the rest of this book. Within this message, there are questions raised about the following in relation to all, but specifically EAL/international students:

• Is language proficiency and therefore ability to linguistically de-code, the knowledge, instructions and tasks students engage with the main issue?

• Is academic ability – i.e. the level of knowledge that is required at TPG study – regardless of language a key issue for students?

• Do students have the required foundational knowledge in a discipline upon which to build the new information they are expected to work with?

• Do teachers approach face to face sessions in a way that helps students to feel comfortable and voice their (lack of) understanding? Are teacher’s expectations fair and reasonable?

• Do teachers speak to EAL students in a manner and using language that enables them to understand what is being said and respond with ease? How do they check this?

• Are the instructions that students are required to follow clear and easy to understand?

• Is there any questioning around students’ choices to make notes in languages other than the one of instruction? Should this be seen as a problem at all? Does it necessarily demonstrate a lack of understanding?

• What role do EAP teachers play in the success or failure of students once they move beyond the pre-sessional programme? Do pre-sessionals inadequately prepare students for a TPG programme?

• Is EAP assessment of language proficiency incorrect?

• Does/should taking a pre-sessional automatically mean that a student is able to cope with the language load of any TPG programme?

The surprise at Mai’s language level also suggests that there is little awareness of what IELTS 6.5 or equivalent means in reality or of what difference can be made to this on a pre-sessional programme. This is a problem faced in many HE contexts (Ginther & Elder, 2014 for parallels within the United States and Australian contexts) It is clear then that the difficulties that Mai was facing were far more complex than simply not having good enough language that should already have been fixed by some extra EAP focused classes.

As well as agreeing to meet both Mai and her teacher to establish where help and support could be provided, I looked again at the assessments and grades Mai had been awarded by the EAP unit, and asked a number of colleagues, some of whom were also IELTS examiners, to provide second opinions of the writing she had produced. There was general consensus that the assessment she had received from the presessional programmes was accurate. Comments on her writing were as follows:

• The student has issues with linking ideas. She frequently uses commas to link ideas when it isn’t appropriate and has issues with basic linking of ideas … It is littered with basic grammatical mistakes … I’m not sure these made the piece of work incomprehensible. (LC15)

This second statement, from an EAP teacher, focuses fully on the language of the piece of student writing. Problematically here, though, the language is taken out of the context of the discourse being built. The EAP teacher is confident in commenting on basic grammatical errors but lacks confidence in connecting these to the comprehensibility or not of the piece of writing. The comment suggests, as might be expected, a strong focus on the mechanics of language used to create a low-level coherent utterance – language that is used to connect ideas within and across sentences to build a paragraph. What is missing is any suggestion that these words work to demonstrate any clear disciplinary knowledge and understanding. In fact, the EAP teacher finishes with this very comment – that she is unclear as to whether it makes sense here or not. There is then, a disconnect between what is valued in terms of language learning and accuracy and the clear demonstration of how to communicate disciplinary knowledge.

In both of these statements, therefore, language is viewed as separate from content but from opposite perspectives – the first viewing language deficiency as the cause of written incomprehensibility, the second viewing it as problematic but not necessarily creating incomprehension – the suggestion being that this may be as a result of lack of content understanding. Mai herself needed to move between and navigate through these two different approaches to the work she produced and the way she communicated.

• I think in the Language Centre I learned something about reading skills, writing skills, something like that but actually I think in my postgraduate study requires more your academic knowledge.

• The language that I need is about my project, yeah. So maybe I know in the Language Centre the final, the, yes, the final language course is about your subject but I think I need more specific like how some study plan to let you know how to study the academic word, yeah. Maybe also give some website about your course maybe.

In fact, Mai’s School did provide online information to all its TPG students over the summer to help them to prepare for their programme

• over the summer before the course started we were given some guidelines and we were given some suggested reading and also there was an online quiz that you could take multiple times and that was really helpful because that explained basically the background that they wanted you to be familiar with. (FS4)

Mai should have received this, but when asked about it had no memory of receiving the information and had definitely not looked at it. While it is possible that she did not receive the information, what seems more likely is that she did not register its importance and was already fully focused on developing her language on the pre-sessional programme. This is what she had been informed should be her priority before beginning her TPG studies. By not engaging with this preparatory work, Mai was already less well informed than others from day one of her academic programme.

This bi-directional pull between developing content knowledge and language learning is a continued theme in Mai’s story. Following on from the email of concern from Mai’s tutor, a support package was put in place for her. This involved her being allocated a Post-graduate researcher ‘buddy’ who was part of an ‘accelerated learning scheme’ to help her review subject content, as well as being told to attend extra language development classes and 1:1 meetings with me to discuss her work. This was decided in a relatively formal, and minuted meeting:

• ‘It was agreed that [Mai] would rewrite her XXXX3M literature review and submit on Monday 21st November. This would not be reassessed but [Mai] would be able to work with MA and BB to write at a higher standard. This will be a useful exercise and allow [Mai] to learn how to write an assessment at the expected standard. BB will also be able to help [Mai] learn associate skills and strategies to help her write future assessments. It was agreed that BB, MA and [Mai] would meet together in BB’s office on 7th November. MA will meet with [Mai] regularly (ideally twice a week, for the next 2–3 weeks).

As previously discussed, [Mai] should continue to attend teaching sessions but would be allowed to miss recorded lectures to attend Language Centre sessions, and other meetings with MA and/or BB. She should use lecture capture to catch up on missed lectures. She will also receive an extension for XXX2M data analysis I (15th December), which will give her two weeks following submission of XXX2M data analysis to focus on the XXX assessment.

Mai was, then, given extra time and support to allow her to develop her understanding of the necessary skills and content, but was also told to prioritise language classes (in isolation to her subject content) over lectures that she could catch up on later by watching recordings. In fact, the message that Mai took from this meeting was that she should attend these language classes as a priority over all other sessions. She then went on to miss a number of sessions that were not recorded because they clashed with the language insessional classes, despite her conclusion that:

• actually I think the language course just help you with the writing skills is very useful and other just to learn, like let you know how to live in UK ,yeah. Some, I think just some life, some were life, some skills about how to live.

Furthermore, in conversation with me, Mai was able to identify that what she actually felt she needed help with was technical, subject specific vocabulary development. Mai tried to express how this was one of her greatest barriers to learning in multiple ways:

• maybe sometimes I can’t understand the words. Okay, I am still thinking what they mean about the word. And what the teacher said later, I don’t know, yeah. I maybe not care.

• The most difficult I think is the academic word, yeah, because in some about science project maybe have some more academic word, yeah, you need know and you don’t understand … academic biology word.

• when you reading the word you need record it and know the translation and then if someone like teacher maybe said this word so you know the word mean.

However, Mai barely engaged in the support she was offered that did move towards connecting language work with her academic communication needs. Whilst she was happy to meet me to chat and be recorded talking about how she felt about her studies and language development, the academic work that we were supposed to discuss together never materialised. She had always forgotten to bring it or had not managed to write the paragraph we had asked her to re-work. We did have one meeting that included Mai, myself and the ‘buddy’ (MA) but follow up meeting requests went unanswered.

So, in spite of being offered the support she identified as needing, and had been told to access by her programme leader, Mai chose to take up the more surface level opportunities for engagement rather than ones that might have enabled her to extend and deepen her understanding.

There are examples of this surface level engagement running throughout the data I collected around Mai, covering a range of different aspects of her academic life. From my own notes of the first meeting I had with Mai and her tutor:

• For the assessment, Mai had generally completed the parts of the paper that required her to follow instructions, copying & pasting sequences from a website. She had not attempted the higher order tasks requiring critical analysis or thought.

From a further chat over coffee that I had with her, I recorded my surprise at her lack of personal connection with people in her School

• She cannot remember the names of any of her tutors! She is getting a new personal tutor – she feels that XXX was always too busy to speak to and support her. She asks her for help and she says she doesn’t have the time.

It is here that many of Mai’s problems seem to lie. Her tutor had, very early on in Semester 1, identified Mai’s need for help and acted quickly to try and get something in place for her. However, this support did not fit properly with Mai’s specific needs or with her timetable and did not seem to meet her expectations of the kind of support she wanted nor from whom it should come. Beyond these actions, the teacher did not make herself available to provide extra help as she did not see this as part of her responsibilities. The tensions between student need and expectations and academic time and expectations, and the tensions between language proficiency and academic content competence all come into play. Mai, it seems, fell between the gaps of each of these and was able to suggest many reasons as to why she was not managing to complete the required work, or understand.

It was, in part, connected to the intensity and density of the content, delivered in an as yet unfamiliar language:

• if I listen the English a long time maybe I have some headache, yeah. So maybe in one hour of class I just listen half an hour.

It was also a lack of subject specific vocabulary:

• The most difficult I think is the academic word, yeah, because in some about science project maybe have some more academic word, yeah, you need know and you don’t understand … academic biology word.

Yet also connected to perceived differences in levels of knowledge, and assumptions made around the knowledge she had:

• I think my classmates have knowledge much more than me … I think because they are UK student, you know. They, maybe they know how to study in UK but I don’t know and maybe their knowledge is, some knowledge that we learn is different. It’s some may be a little different, yeah, and maybe the, and the teacher know what they learned before but the teacher don’t know I learned before.

Here, Mai also touches on the differences in educational approaches to study, and what knowledge is privileged, and this leads to suggestions that confidence is also an issue. Here Mai initially suggests that confidence is an issue for all international students, but quite quickly moves towards it being a personal difficulty:

• the international student don’t have confidence to join the class, to join the, to join to talk with our UK classmate. BB: Why do you think that is?Maybe just my problem because I am very shy in the class so I have some question maybe I just ask the classmate who nearby, yeah, to me. So, and use a very low voice to ask, yeah, because I think maybe they all know this answer but I don’t know, yeah. Yeah, it’s just about confidence.

However, behind all of these self-identified barriers to being able to participate in and gain access to the learning community she is part of, there is also a resistance to doing so. This seems to be particularly true around developing an understanding of the specialist English that she needs in order to do this. Mai reports this as ‘not caring’, but it also seems to be a (semi) conscious resistance to the use of a different language to communicate with peers when Chinese is viewed as the dominant and common language for those she will remain in contact with. Therefore, when discussing English as being the accepted language for scientific communication, Mai’s response was:

• Maybe in the, maybe in China they give the Chinese name and after the Chinese name give the English name, but most of Chinese student… BB: Don’t listen? …they, yeah. We are missing the English name. Who care? I think, because they all use Chinese. They don’t know the English name.

Despite having been given the opportunity to learn this key, core technical English vocabulary prior to beginning her TPG studies, Mai had resisted learning it and continued to use only the Chinese. Mai also reported choosing to discuss her studies in the United Kingdom only with other Chinese students, including a friend who was studying in China, rather than those from other countries on her programme. As there was only one other Chinese student taking the same programme, this limited her choices considerably:

• my classmate from China so sometimes maybe we can together, sometimes because some option class is different, maybe do it myself. BB: And what about all the other students? Why does it need to be the one from China? Because we can discuss more fast yeah. If I don’t know how to say it use English I can use other word, you know. And if with other UK student, sometimes we make maybe, the speed is so fast.

In fact, Mai expressed as much concern over not knowing the Chinese term for something as she did over her lack of English vocabulary:

• sometimes if you use English you can’t remember the Chinese name.

Her concern over maintaining her identity as a speaker of Chinese meant that she maintained a focus on translation as a means of understanding the knowledge that was communicated to her in English. Thus, when reading, she continued to translate all unknown vocabulary into Chinese, keeping a notebook that was simply a list of words with their translation:

• when you reading the word you need record it and know the translation.

This meant that in class, she tended to not pay attention and to simply wait until it was finished to translate or ask her friends to explain, ultimately leading her to suggest that she stopped listening and, again, ‘didn’t care’:

• It’s difficult. I need time to understand so I don’t make mistakes. I will do after class. I remember last class like this, it takes a lot of time. I will ask my friends and they explain.

• maybe sometimes I can’t understand the words. Okay, I am still thinking what they mean about the word. And what the teacher said later, I don’t know. I maybe not care.

This resistance to full engagement with developing the language needed to communicate effectively in English in her discipline could be seen as an agential choice, a desire to maintain a previously held identity and a push against a powerful hegemonic force. It could also be seen as a way of protecting herself, by saying she didn’t care she was able to save face when she didn’t meet the requirements of her assessments. Either way, Mai presented a challenge to this School. It was clear that the majority of participants from the School had thought very little about the impact and use of language in communication of disciplinary knowledge. One of the teachers I observed, for example, argued that language in his context was not an issue at all; there are just a few key words and that from these enough could be understood. Yet during my observations I wrote down lists of conceptual vocabulary and language used in a subject specific context that would be likely to form a barrier for an EAL speaker who had previously studied English for general (academic) purposes. During the practical classes, there was a great deal of general conversation, both around social activities and the academic work being undertaken. The two were frequently interwoven, making it difficult to separate where one ends and the other begins. For a student struggling with both the new content of the subject and the language of study, the obvious approach to this ‘noise’ would be to ignore it, to block it out and to decide you ‘didn’t care’. I observed Mai do this and by doing this much of the expected or presumed learning was lost, as was much of the affirming and confidence building that is important for avoiding a sense of isolation when struggling with information.

Although Mai herself seemed to resist incorporating language development into her disciplinary studies, this lack of awareness of the importance of language from those who were teaching her only compounded her difficulties. Mai, overwhelmed by the amount of work she was presented with, relied on her teachers to guide her as to what was important to learn. By either ignoring language as an issue at all, or suggesting it was something to learn elsewhere and not an integral part of her subject, Mai was not given the right opportunities she needed to enable her to succeed. A shift in this perception is clear in a later email I received from Mai’s tutor:

• Any chance you are free on Wednesday morning? This might be an opportunity to get to the bottom of whether it is primarily a language problem-[Mai] not being able to understand what she was being asked to do – or a combination of language plus science – doesn’t understand the concepts so can’t articulate them.

However, by this time it was too late. Mai’s resistance had become even stronger and, although she remained determined to continue with her studies, she no longer responded to offers of support from others. She was given extensions to assessments but did not achieve the grades that would allow her to successfully continue into Semester 2.

Lin

In contrast to Mai, Lin’s story is one of success. However, as with

Mai’s difficulties, this success cannot easily be attributed to one specific area or personal attribute. Rather it was a combination of agential choice, strong identity, resistance, support and structures that combined to enable Lin to navigate through her programme with success.

Lin, like Mai, began her time at University in the United Kingdom on a pre-sessional programme in an EAP teaching unit. She arrived with an overall IELTS score of 6.0 and took the summer content-based pre-sessional in order to make up the 0.5 shortfall in her language entry requirement. While Mai’s pre-sessional programmes had either been English for general academic purposes or, over the summer had moved towards having a science focus but in a broad sense, Lin’s programme had been created in collaboration with a teacher from her receiving academic School. The content of the programme focused on foundational theories and knowledge for her discipline and the assessments she took were written to enable her to develop an understanding of her disciplinary discourse norms. At the end of the pre-sessional programme, Lin achieved an overall score of 60, which was 5 marks above the agreed expected level for entry to her TPG programme.

On the final day of the pre-sessional programme, the EAP unit held a ‘transition’ event. Through this, students presented their developing understanding of their own identity as students of their discipline, relating this to key theories of identity that they had studied on the programme (see Bond, 2019). Teachers from their receiving School attended this event, and also took part in a symposium where they answered questions from the student audience. In this way, a clear link between the teaching and learning on the EAP pre-sessional programme and their future TPG programme was established. The language and discourse studied was centred on that of the discipline. This connection continued into the academic year as an EAP teacher was employed to work specifically in this School, to teach insessional EAP classes that supported the TPG programmes and offer individual consultations. Thus Lin, as well as all her peers in this School, had continued access to language support throughout the year, and the messages she received from both EAP and subject teachers were consistent around the importance of language use and communication in her discipline.

Within the School, in contrast to Mai’s context, there was a consensus around the difficulties that language created and an understanding that the discipline was centred on language use and nuanced argument created by its expert manipulation. Whilst teachers in this School, as in Mai’s, did not see language work as part of their own remit, they did see a need to collaborate with EAP tutors to enable students to develop a discipline-specific language knowledge.

While Mai found herself on a programme that had a small cohort (8 students) from a range of countries and backgrounds yet chose to develop close relationships only with the one other Chinese student on the programme, thus avoiding the need to communicate in English, Lin was on a programme with 53 students enrolled on it, 44 of whom were from mainland China. For Lin, the path of least resistance would have been to establish partnerships and relationships with other Chinese speakers. It was clear from the beginning of my contact with her that she was determined not to do this.