An exploration of postgraduate international students’ academic relationship with lecturers within a British university

Abstract

The increasing number of international students is a key factor in cultural diversity within the UK higher education system. Higher education institutions in the UK make efforts to provide quality educational experiences to international students. This has been achieved through research which has studied ways of guiding international students’ learning and integration into the local community. Although there were studies from international students’ own perspectives and experiences, there was a clear lack of action to turn their research into useful feedback for universities to be able to address existing issues. Evidently, the student’s voice is missing from attempts to improve higher education for international students and there remains the need for a detailed exploration of international students’ integration at higher education level for the benefit of cultural diversity and international education. In addition, multi-cultural and multi-lingual students create challenges for teaching policies and practices in the host higher education systems which seek to cater for such cultural diversity. Therefore, this study examined the nature of international students’ positive engagement and aimed to offer more insightful analysis through exploring different student and lecturer perspectives of working to improve international education within the UK higher education system. To provide this insight, a mixed-methods research approach was used, by first conducting qualitative interviews with Chinese students during the period of one academic year. Students and lecturers also later participated in a quantitative survey. Results indicate that there were key consistencies and differences among lecturers and students’ views and experiences of international higher education. This study draws on international students’ and lecturers’ authentic voices and personal experiences to develop future strategies and implications to improve international higher education within the UK. Additionally, this research provides a critical review of international students’ positive participation in the host UK education system by exploring the extent that Chinese students and faculty were able to adapt to each other during the learning process. Ultimately, this study contributed to more comprehensively understanding the issues faced by international students and explored effective ways of working with them to improve cultural diversity within the education community.