Academic Literacy Acquisition Of International Students

The increasing competitiveness of Chinese higher education has given rise to a large number of international students at the top universities. How do they develop their academic literacy in such an intercultural context has drawn the attention of the author. The research focus of this study is to gain some fresh insights into the academic literacy acquisition of international students.In the current study, in-depth face-to-face personal interviews were employed and academic writing assignments were collected. The three-round interviews data were analyzed via thematic analysis, and two writing assignments were scrutinized through discourse analysis. The participants in this 8-months study were 2 doctoral engineering international students. The theoretical framework of the study is Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory. The results showed that the academic literacy acquisition of international students was a complicated social progress, within which various factors like social interaction, scaffolding of supervisors, individual efforts, and self-efficacy had played an important role. The findings suggested that the difficulties participants confronted in the acquisition process included jargon problem, grammatical errors, cohesive problem, Meta-discourse markers, and so on. The strategies international students employed to solve the problems and improve their academic literacy were reading a fixed number of English academic papers per week, participating in various social interactions, asking for feedback from teachers, undertaking peer-review, and constructing English writing data-bank.The present study has the following implications for doctoral education of international students in China: firstly, creating virtual and actual platforms for academic exchange; secondly, increasing chances of academic interaction, and encouraging students to conduct presentations and paper feedback; thirdly, prompting the reform of academic English teaching for doctoral students,with an emphasis on the cultivation of intercultural communicative competence for academic purposes.