A new paper that identifies academic communication challenges faced by international students casts a fresh light on the need to refine support services and reframe the blame game on international student capability.
Research into the linguistic challenges faced by international students has rarely delved into discipline-specific experiences, but this new paper by Flinders University’s Werner Botha and colleagues from Flinders and Stockholm – which are critical in order to understand the nature of the challenges students face in different faculties and/or fields.
The study examined the experiences of 430 international postgraduate students at a South Australian university, across multiple disciplines.
This is a challenging issue to discuss in the public domain. Stereotypes of money-hungry universities accepting underprepared international students are used by politicians of various hues and some disaffected staff to push for reductions in student numbers.
This study moves beyond those generalisations, noting that academic support services were widely used, and students interviewed highly engaged, but there were still gaps in academic communication capability – with notable variations between disciplines.
Students were asked by Associate Professor Botha and colleagues to report their experiences via a survey and reading issues were common, with more than 3 in every four students (77%) saying they had difficulty reading academic research articles, whereas 45% had difficulty reading textbooks and just 32% had difficulty reading laboratory reports. When broken down by faculty 89% of HASS students said they had difficulty ready research articles, compared to 72% of nursing and health sciences students.
When it came to writing, 81% of business, government and law students said they had difficulty writing academic essays, compared to 71% of HASS students
So, is it a case of students accepted without sufficient capability, or staff and support services failing to teach effectively?
The survey found than 77% of the international students used the Student Learning Support Service provided at the university library, but three quarters of those students still felt their academic communication skills were insufficient – suggesting that support services are not meeting the perceived needs of students.
The survey also found that an increasing number of students were turning to AI as a coping mechanism to help them with their communication issues, with 34% owning up to using AI for their coursework.
Surprisingly, 82% of HASS students said they had difficulty speaking to professors, lecturers or tutors, and 56% had difficulty speaking to admin staff, whereas only 19% had difficulty speaking to Lab technicians and 26% had difficulty speaking to visitors. In contrast, 67% of health nursing and health sciences students had difficulties speaking to professors, lecturers or tutors and just 265 had difficulty speaking to admin staff.
This study is well worth reading and should be repeated across multiple institutions to improve support services, teaching approaches and / or admission criteria.
The authors argue that instead of conceptualising communication issues as personal deficits of international students and identified a range of systemic issues with academic support provided. In particular, the difference between STEM and non-STEM students indicated a strong need for discipline-specific supports.
“Overall, our current study identifies multiple levels of concern: the inequitable learning experiences of international students; the limited disciplinary capacity to provide embedded support; institutional uncertainties around integrating international students into academic life; and the implications these issues have for the broader quality of higher education,” the authors conclude.
“The recommendations offered here respond directly to these concerns by outlining discipline-specific and institution-wide strategies for strengthening literacy development within postgraduate programs.”