Du, Yunpeng; (2024) Learning Trajectories: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Chinese International Students in UK Higher Education. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Du_10197562_thesis.pdf Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 October 2025. Download (2MB)

Abstract

This thesis explores Chinese international students’ learning experience in UK higher education. Informed by the fields of critical sociolinguistics, ethnography of higher education, and linguistic anthropology of education, it conceptualizes learning as experienced, practiced, and articulated by students for their unique, heterogeneous goals and values. In particular, it investigates students’ learning with reference to their most intricate and personal perspectives, tracing how they make sense of and navigate UK higher education based on their own logic of learning, for what purposes, and with what implications for their studies and wider life trajectories. The thesis draws on recent literature on how the transnational and neoliberal turn of higher education constitutes and is potentially reshaped by international students’ educational endeavors. Specifically, it engages with the line of research that emphasizes the active, contributive role of international students in enacting and negotiating the meaning and outcomes of higher education in major Western English-speaking countries. By deploying an anthropological and sociolinguistic analytical framework that views learning as mediated by and meshing with students’ trajectories of social identification, the thesis follows the trajectories of four Chinese students studying in one-year TESOL or Applied Linguistics master’s programs at a UK university. Through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, it documents how these students position themselves while perceiving and interacting with the academic training they receive and their associated socio-educational experiences. With this account, the thesis argues that a comprehensive understanding of international students’ learning experience requires a nuanced account of how they mobilize heterogeneous knowledge models to establish local epistemologies of doing higher education. This calls for rethinking international students as “mobile agents of knowledge”, who bring in their own perspectives to co-shape with institutions what higher education is, does, and for whom.

Download activity - last month

Export as JSONCSVXML

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Archive Staff Only

View Item