Experiences, challenges, and strategies of multilingual graduate students in English academic writing

Kasmi, Mohammed (2017) Experiences, challenges, and strategies of multilingual graduate students in English academic writing. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

A large number of international students enter Canada every year to pursue their education careers. This academic journey is mostly a positive one, rich in various experiences but not without challenges. In this research, I focused on the main challenges that international graduate students encounter when writing academic papers. Although many studies have researched the difficulties encountered by international students when writing academic papers, few studies have focused on graduate international students’ personal perspectives of these writing experiences. I chose a qualitative case study as my research design because it provides a rich source of data on experiences and perspectives. In this case, I conducted interviews with seven international graduate students in the Faculty of Education. Results of the study show that individual multilingual students are not necessarily deficient in writing skills; rather, it is a complex matter of many factors that come into play such as language, curriculum, writing pedagogies, literacy practices, disciplinary knowledge, etc. The study recommends that, international students who came from diverse cultural/ ideological backgrounds need support to better understand the new academic context and discover what and how to develop their level of academic writing.

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