A narrative study of international postgraduate students’ conceptualization of academic writing through assessment feedback in a UK university

Abstract

Academic writing is an essential skill for higher education and often used as a form of assessment. Academic writing is also very difficult to define due to its situated concept that varies from one academic context to another. This makes it especially difficult for international students who may have limited academic writing experience and whose first language is not English. Furthermore, previous studies often portray international students as students with deficits (Lee & Rice, 2007) due to the many documented cases reporting international students' difficulty when studying abroad, often presented as statistical or performance data and so giving a non-holistic picture. This narrative study looked at international students’ in-depth and holistic experience in conceptualizing academic writing, over 10 months period, taking into account the unique experiences of each participant. The study used blogs, and conversational semi-structured interviews as method for collecting data. These combinations were essential in order to ensure an ongoing longitudinal collection of data without being too intrusive towards the participants. The findings show that there were many interrelated factors involved in the journey of academic writing conceptualization which were both internal and external. Internal factors included the participants’ traits as a learner, their personality and motivation. External factors contributing in this study included the importance of external support that directly and indirectly determine how the participants perceive feedback, which in turn affects their writing behaviour. The importance of criticality as the focal essence of the UK academic writing was also discussed as it seemed to have an important cultural inference for some participants. Lastly, there was evidence of changes and development as well as the inability to change present and this is discussed in the study. This study concludes by providing a series of implications that could be considered not only by the UK universities and international students alike, but also for future student sponsors.