EAL INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCES OF ACADEMIC WRITING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Learning to write for academic purposes is central to undergraduate students’ success in their studies in higher education. With the growth of English-medium-instruction universities around the world, writing in English for academic purposes has become particularly important; yet, it can be particularly challenging for students whose first language is not English (He, 2020). Thus, there is a need to examine English as an additional language (EAL) students’ English academic writing experiences in English-medium higher education. While much work on EAL students’ academic writing has focused on students in Anglophone countries (e.g., Green, 2007; Morton et al., 2015), it is also important to turn research attention to EAL students’ academic writing experiences in the non-Anglophone context.

This paper focuses on the academic writing experiences of a group of EAL international students pursuing their undergraduate studies in an English-medium university in Hong Kong. Informed by sociocultural theory (Lantolf & Pavlenko, 1995) and the framework of academic discourse socialization (Duff, 2010; Kobayashi et al., 2017), the present qualitative study examines how EAL international students perceive their academic writing experiences, how they exercise their agency in learning to write for academic purposes, and how their academic writing experiences affect their identities. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with a group of EAL international undergraduate students and were analyzed via thematic analysis. The findings revealed that EAL international students generally viewed their academic writing experiences positively and perceived that their mastery of academic writing conventions (such as citation) was important to their academic studies. Students were also found to exercise their agency in seeking language feedback from their language course instructors and peers and in capitalizing on a range of online tools (e.g., Grammarly and ChatGPT) in improving their academic writing. Yet they did not appear to be interested in seeking assistance from the university’s academic writing support services or from feepaying language editing services in order to learn to write for academic purposes. Furthermore, the findings showed that most students expressed satisfaction with their own academic writing performance and viewed academic writing primarily as a process, rather than merely a product. While they developed increased confidence in writing in English for academic purposes over time, they also perceived that there was room for improvement and were willing to invest time and energy into improving their academic writing ability further because of the potential benefits it might bring to their future professional careers. The findings further revealed that most EAL international students claimed favourable second-language (L2) academic writer identities as a result of their perception that they had superior L2 proficiency compared to local Hong Kong Chinese students.

Overall, the study contributes to the current understanding of EAL international undergraduate students’ academic writing experiences in English-medium higher education in the non-Anglophone context. The findings of the present study also have implications for promoting EAL international students’ agency in academic writing development and enhancing the provision of academic writing support for EAL international students in English-medium higher education.