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Staff and Students’ Perceptions of English Language Policies and Practices in

‘International’ Universities: A Case Study from the UK

Article · April 2015

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Staff and Students’ Perceptions
of English Language Policies
and Practices in ‘International’
Universities: A Case Study
from the UK
Jennifer Jenkins and Ursula Wingate

This article presents a small qualitative study which aimed to gain an

understanding of how lecturers and international students perceive the
English language policies and practices at their institutions. The findings
show that most participants perceive current policies and practices as
unfair. However, there were discrepancies in lecturers’ and students’
perceptions. While there was convergence in relation to admission policies,
there was stark divergence in relation to expected language standards,
assessment and student support. We also found a prevalence of
monolingual, norm-oriented attitudes among lecturers. The findings
highlight the need for a reconceptualisation of policies and practices in
order to make universities truly international.

Key words: international students, student support, English as a Lingua

franca, Academic Literacies, language socialisation

Introduction
The number of international students in British universities has been rising
steadily over the last decade. According to the statistics provided by the UK
Council for International Student Affairs (UKCISA, 2014), in the academic
year 2012-13, 49% of all full-time research postgraduate and 71% of all
full-time taught postgraduate students were from international backgrounds.
In some fields of study, for instance the Social Sciences, Business and Law,
international student numbers are particularly high. Over 50% of non-EU
international students come from Asian countries, with the number of
Chinese students exceeding any other nationality (UKCISA, 2015).

 
Because of budget cuts in the UK’s higher education system, universities
depend increasingly on high tuition fees paid by international students. As a
result, they have developed sophisticated marketing and recruitment
strategies to expand their share of the lucrative international student market.
However, accommodating large numbers of students from different
cultural, educational and linguistic backgrounds can be challenging for
departments and academic staff, particularly when universities’ recruitment
efforts are not matched by adjustments to English language policies or by
adequate support measures for staff and students. The English language
requirements still expect non-native English speaker (NNES) students to
conform to native English speaker (NES) norms and adapt to the academic
culture of the British university (Jenkins, 2014; Turner, 2011), while for
home students no such adjustments are expected in the opposite direction.
These policies perpetuate the monolingual culture of UK universities and
prevent them from benefiting from the rich linguistic and cultural resources
that international students bring with them. In terms of staff support, there is
little evidence of professional development initiatives that would enhance
lecturers’ intercultural awareness, although new approaches to staff
development that lead to better inclusion of international students have been
proposed (e.g. Leask and Carroll, 2011), and the training needs of non-UK
lecturers have been considered (Luxon and Peelo, 2009). . International
students, on the other hand, still have to rely on a support provision that
consists of one-size-fits-all English language courses. This type of support,
which is further discussed below, is based on the increasingly untenable
assumption that in order to be successful at an ‘international’ university,
students need competence in native English.
Recent studies conducted by researchers who share the latter orientation
have examined international students’ performance and attainment (e.g.
Iannelli and Huang, 2013; Li et al, 2010; Morrison et al, 2005); They seem
to confirm the deficit assumption of NNESs’ English. The findings show
that international students as a whole, and particularly Chinese students at
the undergraduate level (Iannelli and Huang, 2013), persistently achieve
lower grades than other groups. Morrison et al (2005) found that in some
fields of studies, including law, business and education, international
students are less likely than UK-domiciled students to achieve a higher-
class degree. Some studies have found that a significant factor for lower
performance is their English language use and particularly weaknesses in
academic writing (e.g. Berman and Cheng, 2001; Li et al, 2010). This is
despite the fact that current admission and support policies aim to ensure

 
that students have a level of language proficiency that allows them to study
in English-medium academic programmes.
The admission system in Anglophone universities requires students from
NNES backgrounds who were not educated in English medium at secondary
school to obtain certain scores in standardised international tests such as
IELTS (International English Language Testing System). However, the
extent to which these tests can predict students’ ability to use language in
academic contexts has been questioned; Coffin and Hewings (2004), for
example, found that the argumentative and persuasive strategies used in
IELTS essays are very different from academic genres. Moore and Morton
(2005: 63) list various characteristics of IELTS writing that are
incompatible with most university writing, such as ‘writing as opinion-
giving’ or ‘evidence as anecdote, experience’. Breeze (2012: 7) points out
another weakness in the IELTS admissions testing, namely that it ‘seems to
pre-empt discussion of linguistic competence – and the need for proper
language support – by declaring that the students have already attained the
appropriate level at the outset’. The typical support provided by universities
to international students is formed of so-called ‘pre-sessional’ and ‘in-
sessional’ courses for English for Academic Purposes (EAP), offered in
central support units for students from all disciplines. Pre-sessional courses
are designed for students who did not reach the required entry test score and
have a conditional offer depending on successful completion of the
language course. In-sessional language classes are available after students
have started their degree course. Both types are largely generic, as they do
not prepare students for academic communication in their disciplines, but
teach the ’common core skills’ (Hyland, 2004: 4) of academic literacy, such
as taking notes, summarising, or paragraph writing.
In light of the research evidence that international students often achieve
lower results than students from other groups, it could be expected that the
existing English language policies and practices would be subjected to a
critical review, and that new approaches would be sought that give this
high-fee-paying group a fairer chance of success. As the next section will
show, there is no lack of theoretical concepts and empirical evidence
highlighting that the difficulties experienced by newcomers to university
cannot simply be explained by linguistic deficits. The inappropriateness of
remedial approaches in which perceived deficits are treated in generic
language classes has been frequently pointed out. Regardless of such
warnings, universities have maintained this support provision. It is, of
course, not insignificant that generic language programmes are cheaper than
designing and delivering discipline-specific literacy instruction, and, as

 
Hyland points out (2002: 387), they are also ‘logistically undemanding, and
require less skilled staff to implement’.

Critiques of universities’ English language policies and practices

Concerns over language and literacy requirements and the support that
universities provide to novices in academic disciplines have been raised
from various theoretical perspectives. For our study, which is concerned
with institutional requirements and practices, three traditions are relevant:
Academic Literacies, language socialisation and English as a Lingua franca
(ELF) in academic settings.
Scholars from Academic Literacies and language socialisation share the
understanding that in order to be successful at university, students have to
become academically literate, i.e. learn to negotiate the discourses and
social practices of their chosen discipline(s). As academic literacy involves
knowledge of the discipline’s epistemology, socio-cultural context, as well
as the preferred practices and conventions, it cannot be learned outside the
disciplinary context. The widespread belief that literacy problems are equal
to language deficiencies is as inadequate as the associated instructional
approaches (Boughey, 2002). Research by Lea and Street (1998), for
instance, revealed that the difficulties students encountered with academic
writing were more of an epistemological nature. The unfamiliar practices
with which students had to deal often conflicted with their identities and
previous experiences (see also Lillis, 2001). Academic Literacies
proponents have called for more attention to be paid to the practices
surrounding text production and have proposed that ‘alternative ways of
meaning making in academia’ (Lillis and Scott, 2007: 13) should be
explored so that the linguistic and cultural resources that students bring to
the university can be used and legitimised.
Language socialisation theory, which draws on sociocultural theory and
the community-of-practice model (e.g. Lave and Wenger, 1991), is
concerned with the process in which novices learn the language of a specific
discourse community and become competent members through the use of
the language (Ochs, 1986). In this process, expert community members
‘play a very important role in socializing novices and implicitly or explicitly
teaching them to think, feel, and act in accordance with the values,
ideologies, and traditions of the group’ (Duff, 2007: 311). The concept of
language socialisation makes much more explicit than Academic Literacies
that subject lecturers as experts in the disciplines should take responsibility
for their students’ literacy development. The developmental process

 
includes negotiation and interaction and should give those being socialised
agency and self-determination instead of requiring them to reproduce
linguistic conventions (Duff, 2010). The need for negotiation and
interaction has also been stressed by Lillis (2001) who recommends
different types of dialogue around literacy practices between students and
tutors.
The field ELF investigates the use of English in communication between
speakers from different first language backgrounds. ELF scholars have
argued against a deficit view of language use that deviates from native
speaker norms and emphasised ‘the legitimacy of variation in different
communities of use’ (Seidlhofer, 2004: 214). In the discourse community of
contemporary higher education, English functions as a de facto lingua
franca as it is used more often in intercultural communication among
speakers from different first language backgrounds than it is between native
speakers of English. Jenkins (2014) advocates the transformation of English
language policies and practices and points out that while many Anglophone
universities market themselves as international in their drive to recruit large
numbers of international students, they make no steps towards
internationalisation when it comes to language; instead they insist on NES
norms. In a lingua franca environment, she argues, ‘the only criterion
should be mutual intelligibility among the relevant academic community
inside and outside the institution instead of blanket conformity to a
particular version of native English’ (p. 202).

Research rationale
Little is known so far about the experience of lecturers in English-medium
universities who deal with growing numbers of international students, with
the exception of a few studies that focused on the preparedness of academic
staff for an internationalised curriculum (e.g. Leask, 2005, Sawir, 2011) .
By contrast, there is a rich literature on the experiences of international
students studying in English-medium universities and many of the
publications focus on students from Confucian Heritage Cultures (CHC)
(e.g. Morita, 2004; Tran, 2009; Kim, 2011). In addition to academic writing,
students were found to have difficulties with various other aspects of
academic study, for instance understanding lecturers’ feedback comments
(e.g. Carless, 2006), participating in classroom discussions (Holmes, 2006),
and critical thinking (Atkinson, 1997; Melles, 2009). Particularly in relation
to critical thinking and argumentation, some studies have highlighted that
lecturers and peers tend to ascribe certain identities to students according to
their nationality or gender (e.g. Morita, 2004, 2009). For example, students

 
from CHC are a priori regarded as uncritical, indirect and unassertive in
their writing, and as reticent and passive in classroom interactions. These
stereotypical cultural assumptions have been challenged by various scholars
(e.g. Jin and Cortazzi, 2011; Wu and Rubin, 2000), particularly as they are
based on a purely Western understanding of criticality. However, these
prejudgments seem to occur frequently and can force students to accept
negative identities, as Morita (2004) shows in the case of a Japanese
graduate student in a US university. There is also a tendency to preconceive
international students as lacking English language competence, which can
lead to identities of deficiency and marginalisation (Fotavatian, 2012;
Morita, 2009). Several of these studies point out a lack of understanding of
students’ real needs and of shortcomings in literacy support, as well as
lecturers’ and peers’ own lack of intercultural awareness. However, these
studies seem to have made as little impact as the voices from Academic
Literacies, language socialisation and ELF; on the contrary, Anglophone
universities continue with their normative policies and practices.
Given that most research has focused on students, we found it important
to investigate lecturers’ perceptions of the situation. In a previous study,
Jenkins (2014) explored the perspectives of 166 academics from 24
countries on their universities’ English language policies and practices. The
questionnaire with ten open-ended questions elicited information on the
type of existing policies and practices, and lecturers’ perceptions of them
(questions 1 and 2); the institutions’ entry requirements for NNES students
(3); lecturer expectations towards, and assessment, of NNES students’
written work (4); and expectations towards spoken English (5); the support
provided by the university (6); lecturer perceptions of the effect that
expectations of students’ English have on NNES and NES (7); lecturer
perceptions of the responsibilities of staff and students (both NNES and
NES) in achieving intercultural communication (8); and perceived
implications of being ‘an international university’ for English language
requirements (9). The last question invited participants’ comments on the
questionnaire itself (see Jenkins, 2014: 214-215 for full questionnaire).
Jenkins found that the majority of her respondents regarded ‘native’, i.e.
North American or British academic English, as superior to other varieties,
even though many were tolerant of NNES divergences. The majority also
considered policies and practices such as language entry tests and remedial
English teaching as useful in ensuring that standards are maintained and
helping NNES students to conform with the standards. At the same time, the
support offered to students to meet these expectations was perceived as
insufficient by most participants. Overall, Jenkins observed a strong

 
tendency in the responses to put the onus of achieving successful
intercultural communication and standard language use on the NNES
students. This suggests a lack of awareness of institutional, lecturers’ and
NES students’ responsibilities in helping international students in this
achievement.
In this study, we wanted to gain deeper insights into the extent to which
the existing English language policies are supported by academic staff, and
how they affect everyday teaching and assessment practices. Lecturers’
perceptions and their account of their experience with international students
will be informative for staff development initiatives that aim at enhancing
intercultural awareness and linguistic tolerance. Lastly, we were interested
in comparing lecturers’ and international students’ perspectives on English
language policies and practices and the impact that they may have on
student identities. Whilst there is some research evidence of mismatches
between lecturers’ and students’ perceptions, for instance of the nature of
writing difficulties (Bitchener and Basturkmen, 2006) and the usefulness of
feedback comments (Carless, 2006), little is known about possible
convergences. For this purpose, we took a case study approach which was
mainly based on interviews with a small sample of lecturers and
international students at two universities in the UK.

The study
The study had the following objectives:

1. To explore and compare UK university staff and student perceptions

of English language policies and practices concerning international
students;
2. To explore and compare their perceptions of the impact of university
English language policies and practices on international students.

Methods
To account for the different types of universities that exist in the UK’s
higher education system, we conducted interviews at a ‘new’, or post-1992
university (henceforth NU), and an ‘old’, research-led university belonging
to the Russell Group (henceforth RGU), which represents 24 ‘elite’
universities in the UK. As the number of lecturers and students with whom
we could arrange face-to-face interviews was limited, we also drew on a
subset of Jenkins’ (2014) survey and reanalysed the responses of the UK
participants. Thus, our data set consisted of:

 
 1. Semi-structured interviews with 10 lecturers and 10 international
students at two UK universities (NU and RGU)
2. Questionnaire (open questions) with 29 lecturers from 7 UK
universities.

Semi-structured interviews
To recruit lecturers for the interviews, we approached the universities’
academic development units and asked for names of staff members who
were interested and engaged in student learning, assuming that they were
more likely to participate in our research. From altogether 21 contacts we
received, we excluded three lecturers because they worked in \/student
support units. Ten out of the 18 lecturers to whom we sent a recruitment
letter agreed to participate. This small sample of self-selecting participants
who were identified as having an interest in teaching and learning is a
methodological limitation and means that the findings may not be
representative of the wider population of university lecturers.

TABLE 1
Background of lecturers participating in interviews
‘New’ University (NU) Russell Group University (RGU)
Social • Business Social • Business
Sciences postgraduate Sciences Management
• Communication undergraduate
postgraduate • Management
postgraduate
• Education
postgraduate
Law • Undergraduate Law • Postgraduate
• Postgraduate
Health • Health-related Health • Pharmacy
postgraduate postgraduate

The ten lecturers, five from the NU and five from RGU, were all directors
of study programmes that have fairly high percentages of international
students. Nine of the lecturers were themselves NES, and one was a French
national. As can be seen in Table 1, the participants came from three fields
and, across the two institutions, roughly corresponding disciplines.

 
 The postgraduate programmes led by the participants all have regular
intakes of between 35 and 65 per cent of international students. Although
the enrolment of international students is usually lower in undergraduate
programmes, two of the three undergraduate programmes referred to in this
study, Business at NU, and Business Management at RGU, have a high
participation of international students, ranging between 20 and 40 per cent,
many of who come from Southeast Asia.
Our original intention was to interview two international students from
each programme represented by the participating lecturers, in order to
achieve a matched comparison of perceptions. This proved very difficult to
realise, however, either because lecturers did not provide student contacts,
or because students did not respond to recruitment e-mails or appear for
arranged meetings. In the end, we interviewed ten students, two each from
Business (postgraduate, NU), Management (postgraduate, RGU), Education
(postgraduate, RGU), Law (postgraduate, NU), and Pharmacy
(postgraduate, RGU). Three students came from China, two from Korea,
and the remaining five came from Greece, Malaysia, Mexico, Taiwan and
Turkey.
Both lecturers and students were asked the following broad questions:

1. What are the university’s expectations towards international

students’ proficiency in English?
2. What effect do these expectations have on international students?
3. What support is provided to students?
4. How do you assess the support provision?

Questions 1, 3 and 4 relate to the first research objective. A question

about ‘English language policies and practices’ was not directly asked, as
there might be different understandings, or little knowledge of what these
policies and practices might be. The question about the university’s
expectations towards English proficiency, however, was likely to trigger
information about the institution’s policies (e.g. entry requirements,
assessment), while the questions concerning student support relates to the
institution’s language practices. In most interviews, these questions
prompted detailed responses that offered rich information in relation to the
two research objectives. In a few cases, when answers were not extensive,
we probed further with questions such as ‘Do you make any allowances for
international students in written assignments?’ or ‘What do you think the
university or staff should do to support internationals students?’ The

 
interviews with the lecturers lasted 40-65 minutes and the student
interviews 28-45 minutes.

Questionnaire
The subset of Jenkins’s (2014) data consisted of the responses from the 29
UK participants, of which 12 came from new universities and 17 from old
ones (both Russell Group and non-Russell Group), and from disciplines
ranging across sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We analysed the
questionnaire items which were directly related to the interview questions,
i.e. items 3 and 4 which concerned the university’s and the staff member’s
expectations towards international students’ English, item 6 which asked
about the support provision at the respondents’ universities, and item 7
which asked about the impact of these expectations on international
students.
The interview data as well as the questionnaire responses were analysed
through qualitative content analysis, in which initial coding was followed
by second level coding during which the codes were organised into themes.
These individual themes were then scrutinised to uncover any ‘latent’
meanings (Dörnyei, 2007: 246) hidden under the surface in addition to the
literal meanings expressed by the respondents. The main themes emerging
from the analysis are discussed in the next section.

Discussion of findings
The themes that were identified in the data analysis are reported below
within the broader categories determined by the interview questions, i.e. (1)
Expectations towards international students’ proficiency in English, (2)
Effect of these expectations on international students, and (3 and 4) Support
provision and its adequacy. In each category we will present in turn
lecturers’ and students’ perceptions.

Expectations towards international students’ proficiency in English

The comments related to this category were subsumed into two themes:
Admission policies/IELTS and Standards/Assessment practices.

Admission policies/IELTS
All lecturers and the majority of student participants referred to the required
admissions language test, IELTS, and expressed frustration with the
inadequacy of IELTS. The lecturers’ main concern was with the lack of the
test’s predictive value for academic success, while the students were

 
dissatisfied with the fact that the test bears little relationship to the literacy
requirements at university.
The required IELTS scores (the maximum score is 9) range from 6 for
undergraduate programmes and 6.5 for postgraduate programmes at NU to a
minimum of 7 for programmes at RGU. Most lecturers felt that these scores
were unreliable indicators of the language competence that was needed in
their programmes. Some mentioned that many students, having achieved the
required IELTS score, arrive at university in the belief that they have the
appropriate language competence, only to find that they struggle
considerably with all aspects of academic communication. The lecturer of
the Business Management undergraduate programme at RGU reported that
many students are not prepared to seek support, as they

‘refuse to believe that they’ve got a difficulty because they’ve been

accepted on the basis of their qualifications, and - ‘Why should I waste
time going to these classes in English language?’ -, in some ways they
see it as demeaning and therefore they don’t go.’

Another concern with IELTS, raised by nine lecturers (seven in the

interviews and two respondents to Jenkins’ questionnaire), was its
‘unfairness’; this was discussed in some detail by the lecturer in the NU
health-related programme, which has a large intake of Chinese students.
This ‘Western-oriented test’, he explained, places a greater burden on
students from ‘distant cultural backgrounds’ and ‘IELTS 6.5 is pretty damn
high’ for Chinese applicants who have previously had little exposure to
Western culture. Another aspect of unfairness, mentioned by four
interviewees, is that students who have achieved the required IELTS scores
are often admitted in the full knowledge that they will not have the
necessary language competence. In the NU health-related programme, this
leads to the failure of up to 50 per cent of every intake of students. This
mismatch between the language tested and the language needed, the lecturer
asserted, is purposefully ignored by universities whose admission policies
are dictated by the need for money, and supported by an unlimited supply of
high-fee paying students:

‘We in the UK set a standard of IELTS 6.5 but there is an obvious clash
between all universities wanting the money because each student comes
with a ten thousand pound free bonus that’s completely away from any
HEFCE funding problems and because the population of China is in
effect limitless […] so even the moderately wealthy people who live in

 
 Shanghai and the eastern sea border area […] can afford to send their
children abroad and pay for everything. So there is quite a challenge to
what you do because, for the best will in the world, they just don’t come
through the door with what we perceive as good English.’

Admitting students with an IELTS score of 6.5 is also unfair in relation to

their career prospects, the Law lecturer at NU argued. On his postgraduate
programme students regularly complain about difficulties with
understanding lectures and writing assignments. However, managing to
complete the programme is only the first problem for these students; more
are to come if they want to develop a career in the legal profession. As the
lecturer pointed out, ‘high standards of English competence’ are required in
legal careers, and ‘IELTS 6.5 does not quite represent this level’. According
to these two lecturers, this dilemma over the admission of international
students is common at new universities. The entry requirements need to be
kept fairly low to attract students who did not achieve the scores required by
more prestigious universities. However, at the same time the requested
IELTS scores are seen as signalling insufficient language competence that
will impede successful study and access to high-stakes careers. It seems that
the common solution to this dilemma is to admit the students anyway.
Students also expressed predominantly negative views about IELTS.
The main criticism was concerned with the limited relevance of IELTS for
academic study. Several students mentioned that not only were IELTS test
features unrelated to the language and activities they encountered at
university, but that the writing test in particular was counter-productive to
successful writing at university. As a postgraduate student from Mexico
explained:

‘IELTS is about giving your opinion, like you have a topic and you
write an introduction, a body and a conclusion, and you come up with
your ideas and that’s fine. And then you think you should do the same
in your university essays.’

Two other students also reported that as a result of practising opinion-based

writing in preparation for IELTS, they continued to write in this manner at
university and achieved disappointing results in their first assignments.
Some students felt that the entry test works against them in other ways,
too. As a Chinese student in the Management programme at RGU
commented, it relieves lecturers from the responsibility to pay attention to
‘whether we can actually write’, as they believe that ‘if you can fulfil the

 
IELTS scores, you should read and write a lot better’. While most lecturers
participating in this study recognised the low predictive value of IELTS
scores in assuring that students are prepared for academic study, others may
not.

Standards/Assessment practices
Just over half of the participating lecturers (15 questionnaire respondents
and five interviewees) expressed the view that international students need to
conform to so-called ‘standard’, i.e. native, English. The reasons given
ranged from hard-line positions to considerations for student needs.
Lecturers taking the hard-line view expected students to fully conform to
native-speaker standards of English. This is reflected in statements such as
‘non-natives should be 100% committed to becoming fluent in British
English’. The Law lecturer (postgraduate programme) from NU presented a
similar view when he commented on a recent meeting with international
students who complained about language difficulties:

‘All we could respond was that there is an entry qualification in terms of

the standard of English required, this is well known and not a secret and
that the subject is taught in English at an English institution in England,
and the qualification is in English law.’

Hard-liners take the stance that if students choose to study in a British

university, it is their obligation to fulfil the local norms and find ways of
coping with the requirements. Internationalisation is seen as a one-
directional process, in which the student has to make the effort to adapt to
the institution. Language standards are important to maintain ‘the reputation
of the university’ and the ‘high standards of this programme’, and therefore
some respondents were concerned that their universities might lower entry
requirements due to the pressure to admit high-fee-paying students.
Nevertheless, about half of the participants in favour of standard English
norms argued from the perspective of fairness and student needs. A few
considered that achieving a high level of English language competence was
a major reason for international students to study at an English university.
The enforcement of standards through assessment would help them to
improve their English, which, as some said, would also be beneficial for
students’ careers. Ten participants (six interviewees and four respondents to

 
the questionnaire) argued that it would disadvantage students, or ‘set them
up to fail’, if they were allowed to use ‘sub-standard’ English.
In relation to assessment practices, all interviewees and eight
respondents to the questionnaire asserted that they would not make
concessions when assessing international students’ written assignments, for
the same reasons that were given for the importance of language standards.
At the same time, the vast majority of participants stated that they would not
mark students down because of language errors. Only severe linguistic
errors that distort meaning would influence the grade. As one questionnaire
respondent commented, ‘I look for comprehensible writing, not native. I
ignore imperfections if I can understand’. Whilst this practice seems to be
widespread, it is, as one lecturer pointed out, ‘a huge grey area of subjective
interpretation’. A couple of respondents mentioned that they would feel
more comfortable with a consistent and transparent assessment policy.
Several students stated that they thought allowances should be made in
the assessment of international students in order to compensate for the
additional difficulty of studying in a second language. This, for example, as
some students explained, requires them to translate a lot between their first
language and English, which in turn makes reading and writing a slower
procedure than it is for NES students. A Malaysian student explained the
need for an allowance in the following way:

‘If you are disabled they give you some allowances, they give you some
empathy, they give you some you know credits [...]. If you are dyslexic
they give you some, they give you some exemption as well, right? When
you´re a foreign student you almost like a dyslexic person, I mean, not
literally the same but you´re almost fulfilling the disabled criteria […] so
what I would suggest is if universities look at the point these people are
making […] and the ideas and the knowledge that the foreign students
have got to impart or put, that should be marked in terms of criteria.’

The notion that ‘overseas students should be given the concessions similar
to those given to dyslexic students’ was also made by one lecturer. Whilst
we do not wish to suggest that those who are studying in a second language
should be likened to someone with a physical or mental disability, this
seems to be a reasonable point vis-à-vis the comparable levels of difficulty
involved in both situations. Five other students felt that lecturers should
focus more on the ideas expressed in an assignment rather than on style and
grammar. Although the majority of lecturers stated that they ignored
linguistic errors, several students (some of whom were students of the

 
lecturers who had made this statement) believed they had been marked
down because of their un-British style and grammar mistakes.

Effect of expectations on international students

Lecturers’ responses to this question tended to be short, and only four
interviews and three questionnaire respondents referred to the emotional
impact that English language expectations may have on students, such as
frustration, loss of confidence, and demoralisation. Most respondents
emphasised student deficiency rather than emotional or educational effects.
Four interviewees admitted that, on their programmes, international students
from China, East- and Southeast Asia achieved consistently lower results
than other student groups, which they saw as the result of lacking language
competence and criticality. Eleven participants (seven interviewees and four
respondents to the questionnaire) believed that international students were
inclined to stay in their own cultural groups and were unwilling to mix with
home students, or even unwilling to work in groups with them. Students’
reluctance to interact with peers from other cultural backgrounds has been
reported elsewhere (e.g. Summers & Volet, 2008). This segregation was
regarded as a result of low English proficiency and as contributing to it,
and, as one interviewee put it, led to negative perceptions of non-native
speakers by native-speaker students. Seven lecturers claimed that it was the
responsibility of international students to seek interaction with native
speakers and, as one interviewee put it, ‘come out of their ghettos’. This
‘ghetto’ perspective, however, needs to be questioned in view of the
comments made by 34 international postgraduate students in Jenkins’s
conversation study (2014), who complained that most home students keep
to themselves and are unwelcoming when NNES students approach them.
There were, nevertheless, a number of lecturers who considered what
could be done on the institutional side to alleviate the effect of English
language requirements on students. Five (three of them being questionnaire
respondents) suggested that lecturers should adjust their English by
avoiding colloquialisms, idioms and ‘narrow cultural references’. Another
three questionnaire respondents and one interviewee mentioned that
lecturers had to be more accommodating, supportive and tolerant with
international students, and needed to develop more intercultural awareness.
The student participants had far more to say on the effects that English
language requirements have on them. The effect of the language barrier was
already mentioned in the last section. As Shohamy (2013) points out, there
is much evidence that students rely to a large extent on their first language
when studying in a second language. This requires extra time and effort and

 
makes ‘monolingual types of assessment […] discriminatory’ (Shohamy,
2013, 206). The ten student interviewees in this study all expressed feelings
of being disadvantaged, and five mentioned the time delays that occurred
because of their need to translate most information. The most frequently
mentioned problem, however, was the requirement of critical thinking, and
the issue of ascribed identities emerged strongly from the interviews. This is
further discussed in the penultimate section below. Another difficulty that
was frequently stated is following the discourses of lecturers and peers,
which are rich in various dialects, accents, idioms and colloquialisms.
Trying to understand these discourses slows students down considerably
and prevents them from participating in classroom interactions. As a
Turkish student pointed out, ‘by the time you think you worked out what
they meant, the discussion has moved on’. According to some students,
hardly ever is an effort made to adjust speech, or to ensure, through extra
explanations, that tasks and discussions are understood by non-native
speakers, nor is there any attempt to draw them into discussions.
Understanding the English of NES also emerged as a major difficulty in
Jenkins’ (2014) conversations with international students.

Support provision and its adequacy

Three themes emerged from the responses relating to the provision of
student support: (1) Extra-curricular support, (2) Discipline-specific and
individual support and (3) Development of critical thinking.

Extra-curricular student support

When asked about available student support, most lecturers and students
referred to their institution’s pre-sessional and in-sessional courses as the
only available support. Twenty lecturers (seven of them being interviewees)
mentioned the limitations of these extra-curricular courses on the grounds
that they were too generic and did not address critical thinking and
argumentation. On the other hand, several interviewees regarded sending
students to the central unit as an appropriate support measure. These
lecturers’ main concern was that when they referred students to the support
unit they had no means of ensuring that the students actually went there.
Their impression was that the students who most needed language and
literacy support were often under such pressure that they would not have the
time for extra-curricular courses.
Several lecturers acknowledged that support should be specific to the
discipline and relate to the subject content and the genres required in
assignments. Five interviewees had developed discipline-specific

 
workshops to supplement the generic support provision. This was their own
initiative and not supported by the institution. Four interviewees reported
that they spent substantial time in providing individual advice to struggling
students, although this was not recognised in their workload. Their
comments revealed considerable frustration with their universities’ policy of
admitting high numbers of high-fee-paying international students with a
minimum of support provision and little concern for the work that has to be
done by lecturers to help these students to succeed. This resentment is
reflected in the following statement by a questionnaire respondent:
‘A non-native speaker should not take more than twice as much effort to
supervise, since my employers do not give me any credit for the extra
hard work involved. I feel aggrieved and they [international students]
may feel undervalued. Either higher standards of English on entering, or
more recognition of the huge effort to supervise these students is
needed.’

Most student participants shared the view that the support provided by
central units was not helpful for their writing in the discipline, although they
saw some merits in the pre-sessional course they had taken, such as gaining
a basic understanding of academic requirements and some orientation to
studying in a British university. A Korean student said that the pre-sessional
‘can teach you to understand what the teacher wants’ and a Chinese student
found it helpful for learning how to use references. This statement and
others, however, suggest that the value of these courses is limited to
learning surface features of academic literacy. Similarly, in Jenkins’
conversation study a postgraduate student stated that she found the pre-
sessional course useful, but when asked how, could only refer to ‘basic
issues of writing such as such paragraph structure and grammar’ (2014:
187). Some students in the current study found that the conventions taught
in the pre-sessional course did not reflect those of their disciplines. For
example, they had learned that the personal pronoun ‘I’ was to be avoided
in academic writing only to find that they were encouraged to use it in their
discipline. Others found the conventions they had been taught on their pre-
sessional course stifled their creativity.
Students’ comments on the in-sessional courses offered by central units
were predominantly negative. This was not due to the lack of effort by the
supporting unit; one student at RGU reported that the Language Centre sent
frequent e-mail invitations for in-sessional workshops. However, as this
student put it, ‘this general stuff is not what we need’. Instead, she said, they
needed ‘practice’ for individual assignments (what is meant by ‘practice’ is

 
explained in the next section). Another frequent reason given for rejecting
the generic in-sessional support was lack of time. As one MBA student at
NU, who was asked by a lecturer to take in-sessional courses because of
grammar problems, pointed out:

‘But the problem is the time […] and I don´t look at it [i.e. grammar
problems] as something that I really need to improve because I´ve got
other priorities, I need to submit coursework, I need to do my
assignment, so that problem doesn´t get resolved.’
While the majority of lecturers and students share the view that there are
shortcomings in general support practices, there is less agreement
concerning the levels of individual support that should be offered within the
programme.

Discipline-specific and individual support

Scholars have stressed that effective support involves a dialogue between
lecturer and student, including explicit advice on what is expected in an
assignment, and explicit formative feedback on students’ writing (e.g. Lillis,
2001; Nicol, 2010). Such a support system existed in the past when higher
education was reserved for the elite and student numbers were small (see
Ivanič and Lea 2006 for a discussion); today’s mass higher education
system, however, affords little opportunity for students to discuss their
progress with their lecturers.
Several students complained that there was not sufficient advice on the
planning of assignments. A clear disappointment was that lecturers were not
available for the discussion of essay topics, outlines, and possible ways of
developing an argument. The lack of such advice made the writing of their
first assignments a trial-and-error exercise, as the students had little
knowledge of the required genre and no access to examples. Six students
observed that in view of their high tuition fees they had expected more
attention to their needs from lecturers. In the marketing literature of his
programme, one student stated, individual support was highlighted as an
inbuilt feature of the programme, yet during his study, there was no
evidence of this support. A Chinese student on the prestigious Management
programme at RGU (where the tuition fee for international students is
£22,000) needed advice on whether she had chosen the right concept for her
first assignment. As there were over a hundred students on the module, she
thought the module tutor would be too busy to offer individual advice. On
that programme, the students are assigned to an ‘academic advisor’ whom

 
they are encouraged to consult with ‘academic problems’. However, the
student did not approach this person,

‘because the first time I met her she said you can find me if you need a
reference letter or if you have a really important event, otherwise don’t
come to me. I think if she said so I don’t want to find her at all.’

The lecturer participants did not mention individual advice on assignment

writing as a potential support measure. Although several explained that they
would spend a considerable amount of time to advise individual students,
this support is offered (as reported earlier, sometimes with considerable
resentment) as a remedial measure for students who explicitly ask for help,
rather than as a provision for all. Meanwhile, formative feedback was
mentioned by only a few interviewees. Although these participants reported
that they tried to give helpful formative feedback, when it comes to
linguistic aspects, they have reservations. This can be seen in the following
statement:

‘I am a Law lecturer […] I am quite happy to help as far as I can with

improving people’s writing skills but you know I am not an English
support teacher I’m not trained really to help people who really need
specific targeted support – nor are any of my colleagues.’

Subject lecturers’ reluctance to teach ‘writing skills’ has previously been

explained by their perception that issues to do with language are not the
remit of subject specialists and/or the feeling of lack of expertise (e.g.
Jacobs, 2005). Another major reason is the lack of resources. Several
lecturers pointed out that they mark the work of around a hundred students
in their programmes, which makes it impossible to give detailed feedback.
For the student participants, feedback on their writing was clearly an
issue. There were some students who felt that the feedback they had
received helped them to understand shortcomings in their writing; however,
the majority were dissatisfied on the grounds that feedback comments were
trivial, inconsistent and/or vague.
Some postgraduate students said that they needed more ‘practice’ by
which they meant feedback on one or several pieces of ungraded writing.
As a Turkish student explained,

 
 ‘the assignments they gave us were always for evaluation, for marking.
But they might give us different types of assignments, just to give
feedback.’

This would be truly formative feedback that, in the words of another

student, would ‘take the fear out of writing’. However, the opportunity of a
formative assignment was not offered in any programme represented by the
lecturers interviewed in this study.

Development of critical thinking

Offering formative feedback on some ungraded ‘practice’ assignments
would undoubtedly alleviate the great concern expressed by most students
about their uncertainty over the requirement stated in their programme
handbooks and other guidelines for ‘critical thinking’ or ‘critical analysis’.
Although problems with criticality have been typically attributed to CHC
students, in this study, the students from Greece, Mexico and Turkey also
expressed anxiety, stating that they had no previous experience of writing
critically. Whilst most students said that they gradually learned what this
requirement entailed, none had received any explicit explanation, and two
attributed the fact that they failed their first assignments to not having been
critical enough.
A Korean and a Chinese student believed lecturers were unaware of the
fact that criticality was not required, and even discouraged, in other
cultures, and therefore took students’ ability to be critical for granted. The
Korean student pointed out how disadvantaged she felt in comparison with
their Western counterparts:

‘When I go through certain subtopics like critical review, critical

analysis, these people have already done that in their undergraduate, or in
their O-levels or A-levels or they´ve been doing that since small. This is
something new to me. And I feel like this is degrading me or
demoralising me.’

Six lecturers participating in the interviews mentioned difficulties with

criticality in relation to students from CHC backgrounds. Five regarded the
lack of criticality as an ingrained deficiency that students would have to
overcome. On the other hand, the lecturer in the health-related programme
at NU with a high intake of Chinese students viewed the situation
differently. Chinese students, he argued, come to Western education
unaware of the requirement of critical thinking, and because of their

 
educational experience, which, he claimed, is ‘dominated by knowledge
transmission and rote-learning’, they ‘hit problems as soon as they start
doing anything to do with research, especially qualitative research’. Unlike
the other participants in our study, this lecturer believes that instead of
expecting students to adapt to Western epistemologies, programmes should
be redesigned to accommodate students from different cultural and
educational backgrounds.
Three other interviewees also argued that programmes should be
adapted to the needs of international students. However, their approach was
an assimilationist one. In their view, international students’ objectives for
studying at a British university were equally concerned with enhancing their
communicative abilities in English language and culture as with disciplinary
content. Therefore programmes should contain accredited modules that
teach linguistic and cultural aspects of Western academic communication,
including criticality. It could be argued, however, that these lecturers think
within the parameters of a national university and lack understanding of the
environment of an international university in which English functions as a
lingua franca in international communication and in which home staff and
students, too, would need to adapt their linguistic and cultural practices.
These lecturers’ comments suggest that criticality is treated in a biased way
in western education, with only certain topics regarded as ‘legitimate’
focuses of critical comment. From our interview data it seems that
international students exercise considerable critical skills in respect of
current English language policies and practices in international higher
education that are accepted unquestioningly by home staff and students.
Meanwhile, the fact that international students seem to believe that by
contrast with home students, they lack critical skills, appears to be in part a
result of the prevailing western ideology that constantly labels them and
their education systems as ‘uncritical’, and of the vague manner in which
the ‘criticality’ requirement is presented in student handbooks and writing
guides.

Conclusion
In the analysis of lecturer and student responses two dominant features
emerged which were inherent in all the themes discussed earlier. The first is
a strong sense of unfairness of the current English language policies and
practices. The second is the prevalent monolingual and normative attitudes
by lecturers. We will summarise our findings according to these two
features.

 
 In exploring and comparing lecturer and student perceptions, we found
that almost all participants referred to unfairness in the system; however,
what was perceived as unfair differed between lecturers and students. There
was convergence in relation to admission policies, but divergence in
relation to expected language standards, assessment and student support.
The admissions requirement of a specific IELTS score was regarded as
unfair by both lecturers and students because it misguides students into
believing they have the necessary competence for academic study. Some
lecturers suggested a deliberate unfairness in this admissions policy:
universities admit international students for financial gain on the grounds of
a certain test score and ignore evidence that these students have overall
lower attainment chances.
As students are regarded as linguistically fit for study on the grounds of
their IELTS score (e.g. Breeze 2012: 7), lecturers are spared from helping
them with their writing (as some students pointed out), and the university is
spared from providing more than remedial language support. Although over
half the participating lecturers and most students found the existing
provision of generic extracurricular language courses inadequate or even
unfair, their reasons were rather different. Students expect more individual
advice from their subject lecturers and perceive as unfair that this is not
available despite the fact that they pay such high tuition fees. Lecturers
perceive as unfair that the institution expects them to shoulder, without
recognition, the additional workload of looking after international students.
The fundamental reason, however, for the inadequate support system was
not mentioned by any lecturer: the widespread misconception (highlighted
by Academic Literacies scholars such as Lea and Street, 1998) of students’
learning needs being at the level of language rather than academic literacy.
This came across in the statements of several lecturers who saw as the only
weakness of the extracurricular support provision that students’ attendance
could not be monitored and enforced, as well as in statements such as ‘I am
not an English support teacher’. Furthermore, comments made on lacking
criticality show that there is little understanding of the fact that criticality is
a part of academic literacy which all, not only international, students have to
acquire and which can only be developed within the disciplines and with the
help of subject lecturers. The comments made by some participants in this
study confirm the previously discussed tendency to ascribe the lack of
criticality to students from CHC backgrounds (e.g. Morita, 2009; Kim,
2011).
This misconception is paralleled by lecturers’ monolingual attitudes,
which is evident in the fact that out of the 39 lecturers involved in this

 
study, twenty expected students to conform to standard English. In addition,
several believed that international students needed to make greater efforts to
fit in with Anglophone academic culture. Only four lecturers thought that
curriculum changes needed to be made for international students, though
this was purely so as to help international students adjust to the UK
academic context rather than to move towards a more international or
intercultural curriculum. Meanwhile, only nine felt that lecturers had to be
more accommodating, while the majority thought international students
should adapt to the local institution. This attitude was further demonstrated
through lecturers’ comments relating to the question about the effect that
English language requirements may have on international students. Only a
few showed awareness of the possible emotional impact, while most steered
the conversation straight back to student ‘deficiencies’. This is in line with
the prevalent deficiency discourse in relation to students from non-
traditional and international backgrounds, which has been discussed by
scholars from Anglophone universities in various countries (e.g. Boughey,
2002; Ivanič and Lea, 2006; and most recently Thesen and Cooper, 2014).
Students’ perceptions of their support needs as well as of language
standards and assessment practices contrasted considerably with lecturers’
perceptions. In line with the principles of Academic Literacies and language
socialisation, they understood that they needed dialogue and interaction
with expert members of their discourse community, i.e. their lecturers,
rather than grammar classes. In relation to language standards and
assessment, there was a clear feeling of unfairness and disadvantage among
the students. There was also a discrepancy between lecturers’ and students’
perceptions of assessment practices, as many lecturers said that they would
ignore linguistic errors, while students felt they had been marked down
exactly for these errors. This suggests a lack of dialogue between lecturers
and students; furthermore, it suggests that lecturers would benefit from
some training related to assessment and feedback.
Staff training would need to target wider issues than just lecturers’
preoccupation with language norms. The discussion so far has shown that
awareness must be developed of students’ real learning needs in academic
literacy and of adequate ways of supporting student learning. Equally
important is the need to raise awareness of work done in the field of ELF
demonstrating the inappropriateness of continuing to prioritise native
English norms at a time when English has become an academic lingua
franca used by widely diverse student and staff populations in ways that
have been shown to diverge effectively from NESs’ English use. Closely
related to this is the need for intercultural communication training on

 
campus. This would enable university staff to recognise the benefits of
international students enriching the university with their multilingual and
multicultural resources as well as the need to improve their own
intercultural communication skills, rather than expecting international
students to adapt linguistically and culturally to old national models of UK
higher education. However, the lecturers in this study did not receive any
kind of support from their institution in these respects, either through
training opportunities or through time allocation.
Given the vast amount of extra revenue that international students bring
to British universities, the current resourcing situation at many institutions
seems unacceptable. International students generally pay around three times
as much as the home student fee; however, the participants in this study felt
they received no added value for their added contribution. Yet if some of
the fee surplus was used to provide appropriate academic literacy support,
this would not only be of substantial benefit to the students themselves but
would also relieve often intolerable pressures on the overstretched staff who
teach and supervise them. This is not at all to suggest that international
students are less capable than home students. It is simply that when English
is a tool of communication to study another academic subject, it leads to
many difficulties that are not encountered by NES students, and that occupy
a lot of additional student and staff time. This is a fact that often goes
unrecognised by those responsible for the allocation of resourcing within
our universities, perhaps as they themselves rarely have first-hand
experience of teaching international students.
The evidence from our study, even though it is limited by a relatively
small number of lecturer and student participants, supports claims made by
other scholars (e.g. Lea and Street, 1998; Turner, 2011): English language
policies and practices have remained largely unchanged despite the
diversification and internationalisation of higher education. It would
therefore be valuable to follow up this study with a larger-scale
investigation into how widespread this situation is. It would also be useful
to find out whether there is evidence that new universities, which tend to
have intakes of students with lower entry qualifications, make greater
efforts to adjust policies and practices to accommodate international
students, despite little difference in approaches being found between NU
and RGU in this study. The question is how long universities can continue
with business as usual, ignoring the needs of international students while
charging high tuition fees. Our findings of a general feeling of unfairness
and of discrepancies between lecture and student perceptions of language
requirements and support practices are disturbing, especially if they are

 
confirmed on a larger scale, and should be worrying for university
managers. It is not inconceivable, however, that market forces such as the
growing competition for high-fee paying students will eventually make it
inevitable for universities to adjust their monolingual, normative language
policies and practices.

Address for correspondence

Jennifer Jenkins, Faculty of Humanities, University of Southampton, UK, e-

mail: J.Jenkins@soton.ac.uk
Ursula Wingate, Department of Education and Professional Studies, King’s
College London, UK, e-mail: ursula.wingate@kcl.ac.uk

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