Teaching in Higher Education

Critical Perspectives

ISSN: 1356-2517 (Print) 1470-1294 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cthe20

International students: language, culture and the

‘performance of identity’

Bee Bond

To cite this article: Bee Bond (2019) International students: language, culture and
the ‘performance of identity’, Teaching in Higher Education, 24:5, 649-665, DOI:
10.1080/13562517.2019.1593129

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1593129

Published online: 12 Jun 2019.

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TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION
2019, VOL. 24, NO. 5, 649–665
https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1593129

International students: language, culture and the

‘performance of identity’
Bee Bond
The Language Centre, The University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper examines the multiple, intersecting identities expressed Received 18 October 2018
by international taught-post graduate students who are studying Accepted 20 January 2019
in a culture and language that is not their own. The study
KEYWORDS
presented includes the collection of data around and beyond a English for Academic
planned pedagogical intervention on a pre-sessional EAP Purposes (EAP); student
programme. The data were thematically analysed. Conflicting and identity; transition; academic
intersecting identities emerged around themes of: performative, cultures; threshold concepts
representational and core identities; international, national and
individual identity; troublesome and transformative knowledge;
power, agency and choice. These interwove with key underlying
pre-occupations: language development; disciplinary knowledge
and societal structures. By focussing on identity studies alongside
the language and culture of academic contexts, international
students developed an understanding of, and reflexivity around,
their position within UK HE contexts. I argue this focus eased
transition into a new study environment and allowed students to
both better access the taught and hidden curriculum, and to
understand their resistance to it.

Introduction
The transition from secondary into tertiary education has received much attention (see,
for example, Laing, Robinson, and Johnston 2005; Parker 2003), and Higher Education
Institutions (HEIs) now generally have a host of mechanisms and student support net-
works in place to help students as they move into and through life at University (see
Honey 2018 writing for Universities UK; Student Minds [studentminds.org.uk]; or a
context-specific example https://leedsforlife.leeds.ac.uk/). However, the transition into
taught post-graduate (TPG) study remains under-considered (Tobbell and O’Donnell
2015). This lacuna in understanding around TPG transition is further highlighted by an
increasingly diverse and globally mobile student body.
The highest proportion of global student mobility into the UK is currently within the
taught post-graduate sector. 118, 435, or 42%, of all TPG students in the UK came from
outside the EU (almost one third are Chinese) and 31,320 were from the EU but non-UK
domiciled in 2016–2017 (UKCISA 2018). With large numbers of students opting to study
in an English-speaking environment with English as an additional language (EAL) at PGT

CONTACT Bee Bond b.bond@leeds.ac.uk

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
650 B. BOND

level, a number of questions are raised: around the time available to students to adapt and
adjust to a different academic and social culture (Montgomery 2010); around the assump-
tions made in terms of knowledge foundations (Maton 2014; Meyer and Land 2003);
around language proficiency and use (Murray 2016) and around the often occluded
knowledge-communication conventions and practices (Lillis 2003; Nesi and Gardner
2012; Tribble and Wingate 2013). All these issues combine to build a context-specific aca-
demic identity. It is thus becoming increasingly necessary to consider the impact that the
transition to TPG study has on an international student body and how these students navi-
gate the multiple shifts in understanding and in their own identity as a result.
The term ‘international student’ is in itself problematic. For the purposes of this paper
the term will be used to denote those students who are the focus of the study; their
common factors being that they are TPG students for whom English is not a dominant
language, enrolled at a UK university on a higher international fee-paying band, and
have not previously studied within a UK education system at any level. However, it is
necessary to problematise much about the use of the label.
‘International student’ is frequently used as short-hand to define those who are seen as
‘other’, coming from a different educational background and/ or a different language back-
ground (Ortactepe 2013; Ryan 2008). It is often used interchangeably with the equally pro-
blematic ‘Non-native Speaker’ label (Holliday 2006) and both these labels can often lead to
a perceived ‘deficit approach’ where intellectual ability is conflated with language profi-
ciency. Furthermore, ‘International student’ is also used in administrative and financial
terms to denote a fees differential, and therefore gets caught up in the largely negative con-
versations around the neoliberal university and the marketisation of HE. There is evidence
(Bond 2017; Murray 2016) of staff resistance to making changes to educational practice
due to perceptions that neoliberal internationalisation policies are leading to only short-
term changes in the internationalised student body; this in turn perpetuates the sense
of these students working in deficit. Moves to internationalise the curriculum in Higher
Education can thus be seen to maintain an elective affinity (Zepke 2015) with neoliberal
ideology. Through actively encouraging international students to study in the UK, HEIs
clearly gain financially but also academically, socially and culturally. Therefore, they
also have an ethical and moral obligation to consider the issues arising from the multiple,
intersecting transitions this move entails, and to build in support and curricular develop-
ments that enable equality of access for all students as they undertake study in a globalised
environment.

Conceptualising and intersecting notions of language, culture and identity

performance
One currently existing means of smoothing international, EAL student transition into a
UK TPG context are English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pre-sessional programmes.
The impact of these pre-sessional programmes deserves particular attention for a
number of reasons. Firstly, these programmes, running mainly over the summer, are
the first contact many students have with their chosen University. To give an indication
of their scale, almost 2000 students studied at my own institution during summer 2018.
This scenario is replicated on varying scales in at least the 100 institutions, including
private providers, who have membership of the EAP professional body, BALEAP
 TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 651

(www.baleap.org; 2018). This now includes large-scale EAP provision in the transnational
campuses of, for example, Nottingham Ningbo and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool. Similar pro-
grammes exist in all other English-language teaching countries, including those who use
English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI). EAP teaching therefore has the potential to
impact on the experience of a large number of students studying worldwide, across the
full range of disciplines.
The primary purpose of these programmes is ‘to give students access to ways of
knowing: to the discourses which have emerged to represent events, ideas and obser-
vations in the academy’ Hyland (2018, 390), thus allowing them greater access to their
chosen academic discourse ‘community of practice’ (Wenger 1998). Their role, therefore,
is to ease transition into and development through the unstable, liminal linguistic (as
opposed to content knowledge) spaces that lead to disciplinary threshold knowledge
(Meyer and Land 2003, 2005). By acting as a bridge between former and future educational
contexts and studies, EAP pre-sessionals can be conceived as a liminal or ‘between’ stage
when, as Timmermans (2010, 3–4) argues, much transformational learning takes place.
Thus, the learning encountered through these programmes, where language knowledge
and academic cultures and discourses are viewed as thresholds can be viewed within a
Threshold Concepts Framework (Meyer and Land 2005; Timmermans 2010) well as
from the perspective of Applied Linguistics and language learner identity theories (cf.
Duff 2010; Kramsch, 2009; Lillis 2003; Lillis and Turner 2001; Norton 2000; Norton
Peirce 1995). Learners get ‘stuck’ and pass through liminal linguistic spaces as they
move from, but also oscillate between, avoidance, assimilation and accommodation or
integration of the target language or, more specifically, the target discourse.
For students arriving to study in a new country, a new educational context, and in a
‘foreign’ language, the fragmenting and shifting nature of their identity is particularly
raw, both in terms of their self-knowledge and in how they understand themselves to
be perceived by others (Norton 2000; Ortactepe 2013). Following Hall (1996, 598)
many moves from a previous sense of ‘having a unified and stable identity’ to one that
‘is becoming fragmented, composed, not of a single, but of several, sometimes contradic-
tory or unresolved, identities’. Through the new interactions these students are exposed to,
they are required to consider who they are and how they are perceived as a scholar within
their discipline, as a language learner; as a representative of their home country, of their
ethnicity and of their religion; and as an ‘international’ student. These new identities need
then to intersect with their previous and more fixed understanding of themselves as, for
example, a friend, a student, an ice skater.
The life-change brought about by becoming a globally mobile student, leading to well-
documented changes to individual identity and perspective (Gao 2011; Montgomery 2010;
Ortactepe 2013) is compounded by the need to either accept or push against the external
forces that work to create a collective identity for these students, whether that be as an
‘international student’, as a ‘Non-native speaker’; or an ethnic ‘Chinese’, ‘Mexican’, ‘Indo-
nesian’. Whilst these ‘big culture’ (Holliday 1999) labels can be seen as denoting some
shared, common experiences, they also hold dangers of ‘othering’ and diminishing indi-
vidual identities and experiences (Holliday 1999). Globally mobile students need, there-
fore, to develop an identity that can communicate across cultures, and allows them to
form their own ‘small’ cultures within an unfamiliar context (Holliday 1999; Montgomery
2010).
652 B. BOND

In order to understand the impact that global education mobility can have on the stu-
dents involved, it is necessary to understand how their identity shifts and becomes a
‘moveable feast’ (Hall 1996, 598). As students focus on the language of their chosen aca-
demic studies and learn to ‘live’ in this language (Tawada, 1996 (in Kramsch, 2009)) and
engage with meaning-making around empowering and transformative knowledge (Lillis
2003), they cross a number of thresholds in their (self) knowledge and understanding.
Their identity becomes clearly intersectional; they view the world and themselves, and
become aware that they are viewed by others, through multiple lenses. The learning on
a pre-sessional programme can, and should, therefore, require elements of reflexivity
that call into question and allow a focus on a students’ previous sense of self. Their iden-
tity, following Archer (2000), needs to adapt to, and develop through, a new social and
cultural narrative.
The underlying view of identity in this study, then, follows Archer’s (2000) reflexive
self, where the subject has both a personal and a social identity that interact and react
through lived experiences and in relation to individual commitments. Culture, language,
knowledge and experiences interplay to weave a reflexive social being around a private self
which is more fixed in terms of its chosen commitments. However, this underlying view
must also work alongside both a framework for academic development and understand-
ing, and the language and concepts as expressed by the student-participants in the study.
Thus, the pedagogical intervention that forms the centre of the study has an impact on the
view of identity that is represented within this paper.

The pedagogical intervention

The study reported here considers how international students who undertook a pre-ses-
sional programme designed specifically for their future academic discipline perceived
their transition into the academic study within one particular University and School struc-
ture, and the impact this transition had on their own identity and the way they chose to
represent themselves to others.
Thus, the development of an academic identity is highlighted through a framework of
threshold concepts, where language compounds conceptual difficulty and leads ‘to a trans-
formation of personal identity’ (Meyer and Land 2003, 4). However, this framework is
layered with a more socially real student narrative of experience and change. By engaging
with concepts of identity, students begin to understand and articulate their place, and to
recognise the ‘emotional experience of self-doubt, the unsettling feeling that arises when
one questions one’s ways of seeing, of being in the world’ (Timmermans 2010, 10).
These identity theories also act as disciplinary threshold concepts which can be both trans-
formative and troublesome (Meyer and Land 2003, 2005; Meyer, Land, and Baillie 2010).
This, in turn, impacts reflexively on the students’ identity. As Timmermans suggests: ‘For
transformation to occur, learners must first perceive [italics added] these experiences,
knowledge, or phenomena to be “dissonant”, “disorienting” or “troublesome”’ (2010, 9).
Moreover, the sociological theories of identity that are the focus of the pedagogical
intervention outlined within this study are those that were identified as foundational
for the student-participants’ future academic studies. Thus, the concepts of power,
social and cultural capital, of performance and self-representation, of an identity core as
theorised (often incompatible) by Bourdieu, Foucault, Goffman, Hall and Williams are
 TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 653

threaded through, and become themes within, the data as students struggled to engage
with conflicting notions of identity and relate them to their own selves.

The task
The educational context within which this study took place was a summer pre-sessional
programme. This was the first iteration of a new approach to pre-sessional programming
at the University of Leeds, where The Language Centre now works in collaboration with
subject academics to connect and teach EAP through the foundational content of the stu-
dents’ chosen Masters programmes. The strand in which this intervention took place is
called ‘Language for Communication and Society’. Teaching and learning took place
over an intensive 6-week period, with students in formal class-based learning for, on
average, 16 hours per week. The programme was loosely divided into three units of
study of two weeks each. The final unit centred on the theme ‘Communication and the
Performance of Identity’. Students were asked to critically engage with core, foundational
(as identified by the School) subject texts (Goffman, ([1959] 1992); Hall 1996; Thumin
2012) and demonstrate their understandings through a final transitional task. This task
(see Figure 1) required students to consider their own current sense of identity and if/
how it was likely to change over the course of their TPG programme. They were then
asked to ‘perform’ this through a media of their choice at an end of programme event.

Aims
The aim of this pedagogical intervention was to enable students to explore the language,
discourse and concepts within foundational texts in their discipline and to connect theory

Figure 1. Task instructions for students.

654 B. BOND

to practice1 by using themselves as case studies. The intention was that this would encou-
rage students to rationalise some of the complex interactions they encounter in both the
academic and social spheres. The ways in which students engaged with the subject litera-
ture on identity would connect to how they were able to describe the navigation of their
journey through the liminal space created by studying in a non-dominant language.
The explorative research questions were:
Does the pedagogical intervention allow students to:

. Question identity as a concept, understand the role it plays and build on their own
narrative
. Make links to their own (language) learning in general and in their discipline
. Reflect and articulate their own moves through liminal learning spaces

Pedagogical concerns and ethical considerations

If the purpose of education is viewed as being transformative, and thus suggesting a shift
or change in perception or understanding, there will always be a possibility that this shift is
unsettling or negatively impacts a student. This is particularly true when asking students to
specifically consider their own role and identity within a new educational context. There-
fore, when planning this task and study, careful consideration was given to both practical
and ethical issues.
Practical concerns centred on the question of whether students would engage fully in
the task and with the texts they were required to consider. Students were being asked to
do this over the final few days of an intensive period of learning; they had already sub-
mitted their assessed work, so they had no obvious extrinsic motivation to engage. Fur-
thermore, by allowing students to make their own choices as to how to represent their
identities, there was a lack of structure to the final ‘product’ that could result in both stu-
dents and the 13 EAP teachers who were working with them feeling lost as to how to
proceed.
Beyond the structuring, outcome and organisation of the task, there was the added
concern that the teachers involved in working with the students were EAP experts
rather than experts in the discipline of media and communication. Historically, EAP
teaching has carefully avoided teaching content (Belcher 2006; Dudley-Evans 1997;
Morgan 2009; Spack, 1988 (in Pennycook 1997)), whilst increasingly maintaining that
EAP students are best taught within a discipline-specific paradigm (Hyland 2004, 2013,
2018). Thus whilst the teachers were able to work with students on understanding dis-
course and language within the core texts, and could support them as they structured
their ‘performance’, they lacked confidence that they would be able to see where students
were entering ‘stuck places’ (Lather (in Meyer and Land 2005, 375)) in terms of conceptual
understanding. Teachers would not, for example, be confidently able to identify when stu-
dents were ‘mimicking’ (Meyer and Land 2005), but not fully understanding key concepts
and, lacking disciplinary expertise, there was some concern that they may actually mislead
or misrepresent these concepts themselves.
This, in turn, connects to the ethics involved in asking students to ‘perform’ their iden-
tity, particularly when their understanding of their identity was in flux and they were at the
beginning of their conceptual understanding of identity theories. This concern was
 TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 655

compounded by the requirement for students to complete the task in groups. It is proble-
matic to ask students to consider their own identity, but then perform their understanding
of this as a group. However, it was not practically possible for every individual student to
‘perform their identity’ in a final event that represented a physical transition into their aca-
demic School and it was decided that a large number of students would feel uncomfortable
undertaking such a task on their own.
Although the phrase ‘identity performance’ was used, this was primarily to connect
with the foundational work of Goffman ([1959] 1992) and used as a heading for the teach-
ing unit. In fact, through engagement with a text by Thumin (2012), students and teachers
became aware that the task was, in fact, asking them to make a choice around ‘self-rep-
resentation’ and the approach taken was for students to build a narrative around who
they felt they were and/ or were becoming. This focus, it was felt, allowed for a much
more conscious and agential decision-making process than the requirement of a
‘performance’.
Being fully conscious of these multiple concerns at the outset allowed them to be
countered as much as possible by the guiding principles of the programme; namely
that students and teachers are partners, working collaboratively to develop their under-
standing. As non-disciplinary experts, the EAP practitioners avoid presenting identity
theory through a lens ‘loaded’ with tacit ideology, contra to the concerns raised by
Ricketts (2010) around disciplinary teaching of law. Instead, EAP practitioners work
with students on the ideological language, which is viewed as inseparable from the
content. Students ‘contributions to, and struggles around, meaning making’ (Lillis
2003, 196) are the main focus of the task set. Lack of summative assessment
signifies that there is no ‘correct’ way to ‘perform’; autonomy and agency of both stu-
dents and the teachers working with them is encouraged through the choices
presented.

Data collection
The data presented here were collected as part of a much larger, longitudinal study (see
Bond (2017)). An inductive, exploratory qualitative research approach was taken to
allow for an in-depth analysis of the identity development of students who were involved
in this pedagogical intervention. The longitudinal design, with three data collection
phases, was employed to create a rich and developing picture of the process of identity
development. Three sources of data were used: field notes; student-produced artefacts;
and focus group interviews which were conducted within the groupings created for the
pedagogical task.

Sample
The pedagogical intervention involved all students (n. 102) on the pre-sessional strand
‘Language for Communication and Society’. All students took part in the task, and field
notes were taken during this process. An email was then sent out requesting access to
the completed task; and for participation in a focus group meeting. Participation in this
phase was, then, as a result of self-selection in response to the email. Five tasks were
made available with permission to use them. Three groups of students (15 students in
656 B. BOND

total) agreed to meet as focus groups. The data for this study are taken from three of these
task artefacts, produced by three different groups of students.
All of these students were planning to study in the School of Media and Com-
munication; 12 were enrolled on the ‘New Media’ programme, two were enrolled
on ‘Communication and Media’ and one on the ‘Film, Photography and Media’ pro-
gramme. All but one student was female; 14 were from China and one from Saudi
Arabia. Three students began the pre-sessional programme with an overall IELTS2
language score of 6.5 (the current language entry requirement for most TPG pro-
grammes in their chosen School), the rest entered with 6.0. This demographic
broadly reflects the overall make-up of the full ‘Language for Communication and
Society’ cohort.

The performance/ self-representation

The student task was ‘performed’ on the final day of the pre-sessional programme with
members of staff from the receiving School and Faculty in attendance. The event was
held over two hours in multiple connecting rooms; each room had 10–15 different
groups based in it. This allowed groups to both ‘perform’ their task multiple times for
different audiences and also to take breaks and move between rooms to observe and inter-
act with other groups.

Focus groups
The three groups of students who self-selected to participate in the study were interviewed
as separate focus groups on three separate occasions. The first interview took place two
weeks after the end of the pre-sessional programme. The second and third took place
towards the end of November 2016 and in March 2017. All interviews were recorded,
and initial transcription was carried out by a professional transcription service. This tran-
scription was then carefully checked for accuracy and corrections made where needed
(largely due to issues of pronunciation) by the researcher.

Data analysis
The focus of the task and the consequent initial focus group discussion was in connection
to texts which had been identified as foundational to the students’ future discipline, and all
related to defining and understanding identity. Therefore, the data has numerous refer-
ences to students’ emerging understanding of their own identity as they expressed it
through their developing understanding of the conceptual language and theoretical lens
provided by one or more of these theorists.
For this study, data were analysed with a focus on students’ understanding of their
identity within a new linguistic and cultural domain. An intersectional (in the broadest
sense) view of identity was taken, so artefacts and focus group interview transcripts
were read and re-read multiple times until themes emerged inductively. Coding of the
data was carried out manually, with cross-analysis between field notes, artefacts and tran-
scripts taking place repeatedly to ensure reflexive checking and consistency of coding. Par-
ticipants are identified by focus group number (5, 6, 8), an allotted letter (A–D; W–Z and
 TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 657

L–O, respectively) followed by the number (1–3) to indicate which of the series of 3 inter-
views the data came from.

Results
Interestingly, all three groups (in line with most of the other groups) chose to represent
themselves figuratively, suggesting a sense of not yet feeling ‘real’ in their new environ-
ment. Group 5 created a puppet theatre, with cartoon caricatures of each of their faces
attached to a stick. This was held in front of a theatre, whilst the students spoke from
behind the theatre. Each student represented a different aspect of their collectively
agreed identities: as ‘the local people to a foreigner and to a foreigner who is familiar
with Leeds’; ‘language identity’; ‘a friend of B’ (the only non-Chinese student in the
group); ‘academic identity’ and ‘international student’.
Group 8 created a double poster to represent the computer game ‘Super Mario’. Each
group member was a character attempting to play the game, with various obstacles to
overcome. The first level of the game represented their identity as an international
student, learning new academic skills and ways of thinking and thus gaining cultural
capital. The second level represented their transition from being a ‘native’ in their own
country to being a ‘foreigner’ in the UK, trying to navigate new social and cultural
contexts.
Group 6 created a video, with each student represented as a cartoon caricature of them-
selves. However, whereas the other groups focussed on representing their liminal under-
standing of aspects of their shared and changing identity (their reflexive selves), this group
chose to show who each of them was as an individual (their commitments) (Archer 2000).
As the video progressed, a new image appeared around each character in turn to represent
their individual interests. The final image for each character, connecting the group
together was a frame with ‘Keep Calm and Read Bourdieu’ on it – the shared identity pre-
sented as being around their difficulties with, and resistance to, transition into their aca-
demic discipline. Whilst this representational choice was agential and purposeful it could
also be viewed as pre-liminal in terms of conceptual understanding.
Key themes emerged from the students’ growing awareness of their complex and devel-
oping identities. Whilst presented here as separate and at times conflicting binaries, this is
not how the participants understood themselves. They were, to some extent, playing with,
or possibly mimicking, the concepts they had been introduced to and were working to
develop their own understanding, not only of their own identity but of the concepts
themselves.
The participants, therefore, considered and chose to represent themselves through the
following broad and intersecting lenses: performative, representational and core self; indi-
vidual, national and international self; troublesome and transforming self; powerful and
agential self:

Performative, representational and core identities

The data that converged around this theme all came as a result of direct questioning in
relation to students understanding of how identity theory connected to their own experi-
ences; that is, they were asked what they had understood the purpose of the task was and
658 B. BOND

how it connected to the set texts. It is clear that their theoretical understanding was still
emergent; at times they appeared to be mimicking and simply paraphrasing ideas.
However, it also reveals a sense that their identity was fractured and was going to
change over time, of awareness that they were, on occasion, ‘performing’ as a different
person for a different audience. This questioning suggests movement through liminal
and troublesome spaces, but with a sense that this move was necessary and would
result in transformation. Group 5 in particular had thought in detail about this:
We all have different identities from different occasions and toward different audiences. (D1)

Does identity exist if the audience doesn’t exist? How to be oneself?(B1)

Our performance is what we should do, need to do at our identity for example as a Master
degree student. It’s a good way to think about what we need to do and what we should do in
the future. (A1)

This fragmenting and changing identity did not, however, make the students feel as
though they had lost a sense of themselves:
It’s still us, just a different part of us. The core doesn’t change, just a part of us changes, but it’s
still us. (B1)

This acceptance of contradiction, change and difference is threaded through all of the
other themes emerging from the data.

National, international and individual identity

Throughout the whole year of study, students had a heightened awareness of their own
nationality. This presented contradictory challenges and comforts, many of which
echoed those reported by Gao in her study of Chinese study abroad students (2011).
Within both the pre-sessional and their receiving academic department, the Chinese stu-
dents were a minority-majority. They thus benefitted from the support of a culturally fam-
iliar social network:
We are more aware of our national identity. I love Chinese and Chinese food! (8:W1)

I prefer to study with foreigners but when I go back to my room I like to play with Chinese
people because we have the same lifestyle so if I live with foreigners maybe they do something
I don’t like. (6:Y1)

whilst continuing to struggle to gain cultural access to the academic and linguistic context
they were attempting to move into:
we just talk in Chinese because we’re all Chinese people. (6: X1)

Culture and language are also seen as a barrier to understanding in the social arena,
where national identity is connected to and used to explain social behaviour:
Chinese people are shy to express their feelings and many actually want to know more
foreigners and more local people. It’s just that we’re too shy to say, ‘Hello’ and to express
our feelings. (6:Y1)

However, as well as being ‘Chinese’, these students were also aware that being Chinese
or Saudi also now meant being ‘foreign’ and part of an international community that is
 TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 659

viewed as ‘other’ to the home culture. This echoes Montgomery’s (2010) and Kettle’s
(2017) findings that international students form better social relationships with other
international students, in comparison to the connections they make with ‘home’ or UK
students:
South Korea has similar cultural background, so we can understand each other better.
Language barrier is the reason why I don’t ask the UK girl to stop. We should respect
each other countries habits. If the UK girl was Chinese, I would know what words to use
to tell her. I would ask her to stop. (8: M1)

We want to socialise with people from different countries but it’s hard. Yesterday we had a
Welcome Party. Western students sit together. Chinese students sit together. People still play
with people they are familiar with. (8: L1)

By choosing to represent themselves as Super Mario characters, there was an explicit

recognition that the students in Group 8 were playing a game that would continue to
change. They may move up through the levels (or across thresholds), but the outcome
was never a foregone conclusion and they would need to continually learn how to navigate
a different environment. They made clear connections here to Goffman’s theory of identity
performance as well as Bourdieu’s (2010) cultural capital:
The 2nd part of the poster: native to foreigner, looks at social identity. It includes obstacles of
different habits of eating or drinking – food difficulties we must get over. Knowing other
Chinese helps us to find places to buy food, supermarkets. We are still playing the game.
Not yet gained cultural capital. The game will end when we graduate! (L1)

Group 5 students were even more explicit in this:

We actually talk about the social hierarchy from the first week. We are just saying maybe we
are common working class here. (A1)

Group 6, though, chose to reject this representation of themselves as ‘international’ stu-

dents, instead focussing on their own individual and unique characteristics:
Other groups record the life as an international student. We want to say something unique.
We think the identity of ourselves which don’t have the same points as others. All of us are
international students, must be boring. (Y1)

There was a sense that by moving to the UK, their individual identity was being lost
through self, institutional and individual ‘othering’, where students were seen as collec-
tively representing their country of origin (as in Gao (2011)). This group of students,
therefore, resisted this through their choice to represent themselves as individuals, with
individual likes and dislikes.

Troublesome and transformative knowledge

As the students began to consider their understanding of their discipline, language and
culture became increasingly intertwined and inseparable. Students (in Group 6) showed
resistance to, as well as acceptance of, subject content:
We don’t like this book [Bourdieu] so we can’t talk about it a lot.

No! We like this book! It’s really useful to our essay.

660 B. BOND

I think it’s a classical book so if I say it’s useless, nobody will care.

And then later in the same discussion:

I think we are changing but we don’t know the results.

Maybe we will love reading Bourdieu! (followed by collective laughter)

This sense of humour but also hope for change and transformation in their disciplinary
identity, as well as determination to overcome obstacles is repeated here, with clear con-
nections being made to both language and educational cultural barriers
The flowers and turtle are the monsters. They kill or diminish Mario – the barriers. These are
the readings and theorists. These are the difficulties we have to jump over in the game. It’s
easier to do the game as a national students, with the same cultural background. In China
we have a big class, the teacher says something and students listen. Here you need to talk
and talk and talk. (8:L1)

As they progressed through their year of study, they continued to connect their
language work with their sense of self and their ability to participate in their academic
community.
we have more than ten people in the group but only three locals. The others are Chinese. And
every time the lecturer asks questions the three will discuss together and the other Chinese
just listen. Language is really difficult. Sometimes we finish the reading but we don’t quite
understand it all and the local speakers someone talks. The other two sometimes speak so
fast, faster than the lecturer, and it’s really hard to chase her. And I think also it’s a brave
problem maybe because they give us too much pressure we just don’t know how to say
that. Or maybe we have the answer in our own mind but we’re afraid maybe it’s not quite
good. (8:M2)

At the beginning of the study, most of the students on the programme viewed language
use as something that was either right or wrong; as something that you either knew or you
did not. Here there is a shift in understanding of how language connects with self-percep-
tion; Student D’s ‘suspicion upon herself’ suggests a move through the liminal spaces of
language development and an understanding that she is not on a linear journey, but
one that oscillates.
I think I have two or three weeks during the semester I really – I don’t know what happened.
Just hard to understand people’s talking and also hard for me to speak my own ideas. And I
talked to my friends and it just suddenly go well… I remember those weeks were really hard
in the lectures to understand and talk to my friends. Sometimes I just didn’t know how to
express … And suspicion upon myself at that time is really difficult. But I don’t know,
maybe the language is not so stable. Maybe this situation will happen again. (5:D2)

Power, agency and choice

The final theme arising from the data is a sense of excitement around the possibilities for
change, and a sense that the students are making powerful choices to establish new
identities.
Before this summer, I’m a shy student and I wouldn’t talk. This summer, I try to talk with my
friends. It’s a different me, but it’s better, it’s progress. I won’t go back. I will continue to be an
outstanding student. (8:N1)
 TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 661

As they developed an understanding of their new academic context, they were able to
identify the specific challenges they were likely to encounter in their learning, but also to
make agential choices to develop skills over time, to discuss ‘deep’ questions in their own
language when that was where they needed to focus their attention, or to take control of
group work projects:
we are not yet able to question the teacher and the texts; it’s our habit. We need more time to
develop this. (8:M2)

Sometimes we will talk about some deep questions … maybe sometimes we cannot express,
real meaning in English. (6: Z2)

There is an understanding that studying in a ‘foreign’ country will be a transformational

experience, and that this is part of the reason for choosing to study as an international
student. One student described what she expected, and already felt she had gained from
the University three weeks into her academic studies:
The value of being a student and the open resources for you to transform or transfer to new
fields or new aspects. (5:B1)

For me I think it makes me understand what I am now- my current identity and my future
identity, what I want to be, like the ideal me. And how the university is pushing me to change
some of my attributes to change into that person. (5:B1)

Discussion
The study explored the self-perceptions and self-representation of three groups of, or 15
individual, international students who were enrolled on a content-based pre-sessional pro-
gramme and as they transitioned onto a taught post-graduate programme. Analysing the
data from the perspective of identity development revealed four broad themes. However,
these themes cannot be viewed as phases or steps in identity development, or as fixed pos-
itions. Rather, there is movement across and between, with shifting focus on different
themes depending on individual commitments. In fact, if identity is ‘The way a person
understands his or her relationship with the world, how that relationship is structured
across time and space and how the person understands possibilities for the future’
(Norton, 2013 in Norton 2016, 476), within this study the world occupied by the partici-
pants was dominated (as they saw it) by three problematic features: language; academic
knowledge and culture; access to wider society. These three features can be mapped
onto two conceptual frameworks that represent transition, change and empowerment.
Academic Literacies theorises different approaches enabling students to gain linguistic
access to the academy through skills development, socialisation and transformation
(Lea and Street 1998). Meyer and Land’s (2003, 2005) Threshold Concepts conceives of
disciplinary knowledge as being in pre-liminal – liminal and over the threshold states.
International student identity, as represented within this study, can and should be
mapped across both frameworks. However, care needs to be taken not to view any of
these frameworks as linear, with smooth progression through the three ‘states’ each
suggests. The students who were the focus of this study saw themselves as both powerful
and powerless; they understood that they were moving from a position of high levels of
cultural capital in their own countries into one where they had less, but that this was
662 B. BOND

temporary; they both had, and lacked, social capital within the same sphere. Thus, in order
for students to understand and gain access to the education system they are becoming part
of, it is necessary for them, as well as those who work with them, to understand their iden-
tity as complex and oscillating, as moving through linguistic, cultural, structural and
knowledge-based troublesome, transitional and transforming spaces, as both fixed and
changing.
Therefore, whilst often referring to themselves in terms of their national culture, the
participants also problematise their own and others’ conceptions around their nationality.
Students show an understanding that ‘national identities continue to be represented as
unified … as the underlying culture of “one people”’ (Hall 1996, 617) but also that
they are ‘formed and transformed within and in relation to representation’ (612).
They identify both helpful and unhelpful shifts in their identity as they transition
through their year as a TPG student in the UK and consider how this intersects with
their own and their peers’ expectations. Significantly, this includes moves through the
liminal space created by studying in a non-dominant language, which leads to questioning
of self, of academic competence, of ability to express oneself in any language and to an
understanding of the embodied nature of language (Kramsch, 2009).
Language is seen as ‘privileged knowledge’ that creates a barrier to effective (intercul-
tural) communication (Ippolito 2007). The inability to express thoughts in an elegant
and clear way ‘diminishes’ students (8:L1), exasperates them and can lead to a decrease
in self-confidence. Students connect language issues to other troublesome knowledge,
touching on issues of national (self-) stereotyping and ‘othering’, the higher cultural
capital that comes from the ‘audibility’ – i.e. ‘the degree to which speakers sound like,
and are legitimated by, users of the dominant discourse’ (Miller, 2003 (in Ortactepe
2013, 223)) – of being a ‘native speaker’.
Again, having read Stuart Hall as a core disciplinary text, the students expressed a shift
in perception of the real purpose of language, but found it problematic: ‘To speak a
language is not only to express our innermost, original thoughts, it is also to activate
the vast range of meanings which are already embedded in our language and cultural
systems’ (Hall 1996, 608–609). They had begun to disregard their ‘existing understanding
of the signifier in favour of a new one for the new context’ (Land, Rattray, and Vivian 2014,
204), but did so at different points in the year and to different extents. For some, the tran-
sition was deeply troublesome and the ‘affective noise’ created resulted in a sense of being
‘stuck’. Some continued to cling on to a desire to learn more grammar – to maintain their
identity as a ‘learner’ of English rather than a ‘user’; some, at times, retreated into trans-
lation and use of their own language and others shifted towards the more complex per-
spective that ‘it is through language that a person negotiates a sense of self within and
across different sites at different points in time’ (italics added) (Norton Peirce 1995, 13).

Implications for practice

The pedagogical intervention that formed the basis of this study involved asking students
to consider their own changing and emerging identity and to link it to concepts and
language that are seen as foundational to their discipline. As Kramsch suggests, (2009,
205) ‘The language classroom is precisely the place to explore with our students alternative
ways of representing themselves’. By undertaking the task, participants had a heightened
 TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 663

awareness of the identity shifts they were going through, and projected a sense that, having
been given the conceptual language to discuss these shifts, they were at ease with identify-
ing and recognising within themselves the intersecting and oscillating nature of their mul-
tiple identities. Using this approach also provides a window into their ‘commitments’
(Kegan (in Timmermans 2010, 9)), that is, to those unacknowledged motivations that
prevent them from achieving their stated goals.
The initial concerns held by the researcher over lack of assessment, lack of structure and
lack of teacher content-knowledge were not realised. Students engaged fully with the task
and viewed it as an opportunity to meet and make themselves known to their future aca-
demic School. Although it could be argued that it was particularly successful because the
focus of the task, and the texts used, dovetailed with the students’ future discipline, it is
also arguable that with a slight shift in content focus, this task of self-representation as
a marker of transition into a new level of study is one that could be replicated across
the disciplines. This is in line with Barnett and Coate’s (2005 (in Zepke 2015)) suggestion
that one approach to engaging students in their learning is to develop a curriculum around
them knowing or becoming aware of themselves. The task allows students to connect a
new approach to second language use with their academic discipline and begin to under-
stand how the two join to create a new identity; it allows participants ‘to put one’s own
experiences into someone else’s words … creates new symbolic power relations that
enable learners to break with conventions and bring about other symbolic realities’
(Kramsch, 2009, 7).

Notes
1. This had been identified as a particularly problematic requirement of disciplinary study from
previous discussions with past international students and meetings with the academic lead
from the receiving School.
2. International English Language Testing System. See www.ielts.org

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding
author, [BB], upon reasonable request.

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