The challenge of academic writing for Chinese students within ...

Their cognitive and learning styles are shaped, in part, by these contexts of origin. I
would like to understand that aspect of transition more fully.
When students of Chinese origin study as undergraduates in the UK, they encounter
numerous unpredictabilities over and above the daunting unpredictabilities faced by
indigenous students. Not only must they wrap their heads around their chosen
discipline or field of study, but they must do this within an educational and cultural
context which differs hugely from their own. They are also managing this transition in
a second and in some cases a third language. Chinese students within the UK are
studying in multiple, complicated, overlapping and sometimes contradictory contexts
of learning. There is no ready-made framework which I can adopt for what I have
chosen to study. I must construct that framework for myself – what the textbooks
refer to as ‗bricolage‘.
In the first three months of my doctoral study, I spent at least an hour each week
discussing with the primary supervisor, how to develop a conceptual framework – or a
kind of theoretical searchlight – to sustain and cast light on my study. This was a new
idea for me, since my previous postgraduate work had not entailed this kind of wideranging
reading and ‗theorising‘ that is essential for this way of working. In the
supervision meetings, different theoretical perspectives were brought to bear on the
research topic and gradually a set of research questions emerged. But I had to keep
testing and re-testing these against the literature and my own understanding of the
literature. This was fun – highly disciplined fun – but fun nevertheless. This is a very
exciting phase in the development of any intellectual enquiry.
Through discussions with the primary supervisor and literature review a number of
key concepts emerged: among them, ‗origin‘, ‗destination‘, and ‗multiple-identity‘. In
drawing out this conceptual thread, I found it useful to visualise the conceptual
relations and to express these relations in terms of models. My past postgraduate
experience had provided me with the technical resources necessary to develop my
thinking along these lines. Perhaps if my experience had been different, then I would
have worked with these inter-relations in different ways. I have learned that it is
important to work with the intellectual resources one has and to make the very best of
them. So, I am reasonably good at visualising conceptual relations by drawing models
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