International Students In First Year Writing

The book explores the journey of 10 international students to better understand their experiences at a U.S. educational institution and how they constructed and revealed these experiences in this particular socio-academic space. The study features a series of three interviews during the semester that the participants were enrolled in a mainstream first-year writing course; their stories not only capture their experiences but reveal inspiring stories that “give voice” to students outside the dominant cultural and linguistic community. This study raises questions about how to support international students: In what ways can it inform our practices and policies relative to the internationalization of education and the development of global perspectives and competencies? What does it reveal that could impact daily instruction of L2 writing, particularly when it comes to international students’ need to meet the expectations of “university-level writing” in U.S. institutions of higher education? On an individual level, what can we learn from these students and about ourselves as a result of our interactions?

The International Student’s Guide to Writing a Research Paper is a reference text for undergraduate students and those in ESL or bridge courses who are writing a research paper for the first time. This book is partly an update of Writing a Research Paper (by Lionel Menasche, 1998) and partly a companion to The ESL Writer’s Handbook. Each section of the book includes a discrete task called a Building Block, which requires students to apply the skills learned toward the development of their own paper. This step-by-step approach allows students to construct knowledge as they become more familiar with the process, making writing a research paper a less intimidating task. Special features: This guide uses simple direct language for those for whom writing a research paper is new. Most example writing is from international students in an ESL program or first-year writing class, including two sample papers—one in APA and one in MLA. A section on responding to instructor feedback to provide students with the tools to read and understand comments and use them to improve the first draft. A subsection dedicated to constructing clear and cohesive paragraphs and sentences. The guide includes citation and style examples in MLA 8th edition.

Academic writing is a key practice in higher education and central to international students’ academic success in the country of education. International Student Adaptation to Academic Writing in Higher Education addresses the prominent forms of adaptation emerging from international students’ journey to mediate between disciplinary practices, cultural norms and personal desires in meaning making. It introduces new concepts that present different patterns of international student adaptation including surface adaptation, committed adaptation, reverse adaptation and hybrid adaptation. Drawing on these concepts of adaptation, this book provides readers with new and deeper insights into the complex nature of international students’ adjustment to host institutions. It works through many unresolved issues related to cross-border students’ intellectual, cultural, linguistic and personal negotiations. This book presents a trans-disciplinary framework for conceptualising international students’ and lecturers’ practices within the institutional structure. This framework has been developed by drawing on a modified version of Lillis’ heuristic of talk around text and positioning theory. The framework enables an exploration of not only the reasons underpinning international students’ specific ways of meaning making, but also their potential choices in constructing knowledge. A distinctive contribution of the book is the development of a dialogical pedagogic model for mutual adaptation between international students and academics rather than the onus being on exclusive adaptation from the students. Existing research on international education indicates the significance of reciprocal adaptation between international students and academics. Yet very little has been done to conceptualise what mutual adaptation means and what is involved in this process. The dialogical model introduced in this book offers concrete steps towards developing reciprocal adaptation of international students and academics within the overarching institutional realities of the university. It can be used as a tool to enhance the education of international students in this increasingly internationalised environment. This book is a significant contribution to the field of international education. It takes a critical stance on contemporary views of globally mobile students. The insights into international students’ voices, hidden intentions and their potential choices in meaning making presented in this book will attract dialogues about the critical issues related to inclusive practices, internationalised curriculum and institutional responses to the diverse needs of international students.

During the first twenty years of the new millennium, many scholars turned their attention to translingualism, an idea that focuses on the merging of language in distinct social and spatial contexts to serve unique, mutually constitutive, and temporal purposes. This volume joins the more recent shift in pedagogical studies towards an altogether distinct phenomenon: transnationalism. By developing a framework for transnational pedagogical practice, this volume demonstrates the exclusive opportunities afforded to freshmen writers who write in transnational spaces that act as points of fusion for several cultural, lingual, and national identities. With reference to recent works on translingualism and transnationalism, this volume is an attempt to conceptualize effective writing pedagogy in freshman writing courses, which are becoming more and more transnational. It also provides educators and first year writing administrators with practical pedagogical tools to help them use their transnational spaces as a means of achieving their desired learning outcomes as well as teaching students threshold concepts of composition studies. This volume will be particularly useful for first year writing faculty at colleges and universities as well as writing program administrators to create a more effective curriculum that addresses these needs in classroom settings. All scholars with a doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition, English as a Second Language, Translation Studies, to name a few, will also find this a valuable resource.

This work takes a refreshing approach to the academic writing course, providing easily understandable language set within a clear structure.

Are you a non-native English speaker studying or preparing to study at an English-language university? If so, this book is for you. This engaging guide equips students with the tools and confidence to respond effectively and appropriately to written assignments at university. It will help you to develop essential writing skills, such as structuring paragraphs and building an argument, and provides practical guidance on adhering to the conventions of academic writing. It guides the reader systematically through a series of text analyses which bring out key linguistic and rhetorical features, making complex textual issues manageable and understandable for learners of all abilities. Reorganised to allow for easier navigability and revised for greater accessibility, the new edition now includes: - An expanded introduction to show students how to use the book successfully - A writing checklist to review the key principles of skills covered in the book - A broader range of examples - More practical activities - More on plagiarism This is an ideal self-study aid for non-native English speakers, both on pre-sessional language courses and on degree programmes, who need to get to grips with the conventions of academic writing.

Higher education institutions in Anglophone countries often rely on standardized English language proficiency exams to assess the linguistic capabilities of their multilingual international students. However, there is often a mismatch between these scores and the initial experiences of international students in both academic and social contexts. Drawing on a digital ethnography of Chinese international students’ first semester languaging practices, this book examines their challenges, needs and successes on their initial languaging journeys in higher education. It analyzes how they use their rich multilingual and multi-modal communicative repertories to facilitate languaging across contexts, in order to suggest how university support systems might better serve the needs of multilingual international students.