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

Figure 5.20: Li‘s perception of her own learning experience in the UK between September 2007 and May 2009
I spent my entire childhood in Shenzhen until I was 18. Being the only child, I was used to
intense attention. My parents were very strict with my study. Therefore my school experience
was hardly happy. To some extent, it was truly painful. The pressure was already huge when
I was in primary school, and the whole thing was almost unbearable when I went to High
school. Competition was so fierce that I always felt frustrated and stressed. I remember that
before the days of examinations, I could never sleep well. Some nights I was even unable to
close my eyes. The fear of failure and disappointment hovered in my dreams most of the time.
I entered the university in 2005. It was an important turning point of my life. Before that I
was just a student, studying all the time. I did not know why I was studying and what I was
studying for. The university experience opened my eyes to the world. It was the first time in
my life that I was given the opportunity to pursue my real dream, to think about the meaning
of life, and to live differently. It was fascinating.
My first experience of English learning started as early as the age of three or four. We
repeated after the tape under the instructions of teachers but I could never remember any of
it. Reading and writing started in fourth grade at about nine years old. Speaking and
listening were difficult, because we had to tell the differences between pronunciations and try
to memorize them. There were many sounds which did not exist in my knowledge of Chinese
so I thought I must have been really confused at the beginning, but I cannot recall how I
overcame the challenge. At the age of twelve I went to junior high school. Since then there
was no real chance to speak English because it was not required in the English examination.
So my ability in English speaking was mainly developed in primary school.
I decided to study in the UK in 2007, when I was 20. It was an exchange programme between
my university in China and the university in England. I thought it was a good opportunity to
broaden my horizon so I came. I was not at all confident with my English at the time but it
was not until my arrival that I felt the shock. I do not know how to put my feeling. It was like
what I had been studying for years was another language, and what I had known for years
was another country. For the first few months, I could only grasp about fifty to seventy
percent of the classes. There were so much cultural stuff that I did not know, so many accents
that I was not familiar with, and so many new things that I needed to get used to. Even the
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