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

languages. They had been chosen by the Chinese government as the best high school students
in Xinjiang and were given the opportunity to study in high schools in several prosperous
south-eastern cities. Being an international student in the UK I am able to imagine what kind
of challenges those Xinjiang students must have faced when they had to study in a language
and cultural setting so different from the one they were familiar with.
Li
Li is a 22 years old female Chinese student. She is in her 3 rd year of a BA Business and
English Language course. She came to the UK in September 2007, and she has been studying
here for two years. Prior to that, she studied in a university in China for two years. Her
Chinese university has a ‗2+2‘ exchange undergraduate programme (2 years study in China
plus 2 years in the UK) with her current university. She is from a metropolitan city in
southern China, which is next to Hong Kong. I got to know Li via a Chinese student
gathering in 2007. Later, she kindly agreed to participate in the research when I invited her to
be a research subject.
Li‘s graphs of her learning experiences between the ages of 6 and 22, and of her learning
experiences in the UK between September 2007 and April 2009 are shown in Figure 8.19 and
8.20 respectively.
Figure 5.19: Li‘s perception of her own learning experience between the ages of 6 and 22
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