First-year International Undergraduate Students’ Experiences of Completing their Disciplinary Assignments

Internationalisation of higher education has resulted in diverse international student populations in UK universities - one of the most popular academic destinations. Overseas students are enticed by a British university degree, life, and cultural experience. However, adjusting to the new environment poses challenges with not only adjusting to the new culture but also university study demands. Those include performing new academic genres for assessment. Those genres often bear little resemblance to students’ prior experiences with writing, for example, from IELTS preparation of foundation programmes. Therefore, those students are particularly vulnerable at the early stages of their study abroad. Overall, little is known about how first-year international students tackle undergraduate disciplinary assignments. While conversations with those students may be challenging due to their low language proficiency, they are crucial to our understanding of their needs and to supporting them accordingly. Therefore, this study aimed to give those students voice to share their insights into their writing experiences. Qualitative data from five first-year L2 international undergraduate students from a range of academic disciplines was gathered over two semesters. The data set comprised reflective prompts and semi-structured text-based interviews. Participants’ module assignments were used to contextualise the interviews. Interview questions designed around genre theory (Tardy, 2009) facilitated discussing students’ assignments as genre. The findings revealed nuanced insights into participants' experiences with completing their disciplinary assignments. Those insights extended beyond writing, and genre knowledge and included cultural, institutional, and personal factors. Participants relied primarily on their subject tutors for support. When discussing genre, they foregrounded formal genre knowledge including linguistic and structural aspects of their assignments. The findings suggests that a holistic approach to viewing first-year disciplinary writing through a student experience lens is needed. To facilitate this, the study proposes an adaptation to the model of genre development by incorporating student experience. The findings have implications for foundation year leaders, EAP professionals, and subject tutors. The results call for reconsidering how academic writing is viewed and understood.