This study explores the experience of international students who become members of staff in a UK university. The role transition from international student to international staff member brings new challenges, while previous difficulties experienced as an international student may persist. Relatively few studies have investigated the challenges encountered by international staff, and discussion on how to support the transition process for Chinese academics appointed to positions in UK Higher Education (HE) institutions is limited. This study aims to explore whether previous educational experience as international students influences the transition of staff members in UK HE institutions. Data were collected from Chinese students and lecturers through focus groups, interviews, narrative stories and documentary analysis, to provide rich and in-depth data. The findings indicate that Chinese lecturers and students encountered similar challenges, and that comprehensive support arrangements can help international students to transfer smoothly to the role of university lecturers. An academic transition framework is proposed as a guideline for HE institutions to provide integrated support for Chinese academics according to their different needs and transition stages. The implications of this research may be broadly applied to other international students and lecturers,who may face similar challenges in the UK context.

The experience of studying on a multicultural campus is regarded as a highly potent means of developing intercultural skills. However many studies report that authentic interaction between domestic and incoming students is often disappointingly absent. Through interviews this study investigates the experiences of long-stay international students at a British university who have been relatively successful in developing cross- cultural relations. An analysis is carried out of their descriptions of contacts with other cultures and the resulting effects in four areas: their attitudes and behaviour in negotiating cross-cultural interaction, the strategies they adopted to ease their adjustment to the new environment and to reflect on their culture of origin, their levels of success in adopting roles which allowed them to contribute to culturally mixed collectives, and their expectations and motivations to apply what they have learned to future interactions. To locate their responses within a theoretical framework, I have drawn loosely on Lave & Wenger's community of practice conception of learning in a professional context and related it to peer-group formation within study cohorts. The roles interviewees assumed acknowledged their reliance on others' support, but also allowed them to contribute in other ways to the collective. In Wenger's terms many describe a shift over time from legitimate peripheral participation towards core membership. Expectations of future approaches towards intercultural contact and transferability of skills, attitudes and knowledge showed a wide degree of variation, depending on what Wenger terms their trajectories: previous experience, current attitudes and future plans. Five distinct types of trajectory were identified from the interview data. A discussion follows, of ways in which knowledge of these various attitudes, strategies., roles and trajectories can be used to inform the activities of staff in Higher Education wishing to improve and accelerate the quality and reflexivity of students' multicultural experiences.

The present study investigates the effect of study abroad on Chinese learners' L2 pragmatic development longitudinally. Using the Multimedia Elicitation Task (MET) and the Appropriateness Judgment Task (AJT), the study collected data from 20 Chinese graduate students studying abroad (SA) and 20 Chinese graduate students studying at home (A H) at three different points during one academic-year. The SA students also completed a retrospective verbal report (RVR) in each phase of the data collection. Overall the study has evidenced the complexity in the effect of study abroad on learners' L2 pragmatic development. The results revealed that study abroad did not affect the overall frequency of learners' choice of opt-outs, nor did it significantly influence their overall frequency of refusal modifications. However, study abroad did have an impact on the repertoire of pragmatic strategies among the SA students, although the same developmental trend was also observed in the AH students' refusals. Furthermore, a significant decrease in the overall frequency of refusal strategies was only observed in the SA students' data between Phase 2 and Phase 3. This study documented that study abroad did not affect the SA students' overall ratings in the AJT. However, analyses of the SA students' RVR evidenced that their noticing of pragmatic infelicities developed significantly during their study abroad, indicating a positive influence of study abroad in learners' L2 pragmatic perception development. The analyses of the SA students' RVR revealed that the SA students paid increasingly more attention to sociopragmatics when they read the MET, whereas fewer SA students reported employing Ll as the language of thought in fewer instances. The changes of the SA students' preference of directness/indirectness indicated that they became more aware of the social status during social interactions. Furthermore, the study also observed the SA students' pragmatic development across the three phases.

This study explores the journey of 24 non-traditional Indian students who have won a year's Ford Fellowship to do their masters' degree in development in eight different UK universities. The themes in this study revolve around Internationalisation and Widening Participation. I engaged in a longitudinal study (17 months) from a constructivist perspective. The eclectic nature of the data enabled a multidimensional construction of students' perceptions through academic experiences: focus-group interviews in Delhi explored their hopes and fears; questionnaires and follow-up meetings a month after their arrival in the UK revealed their perceptions and issues; two sets of eight in-depth interviews before Christmas and Easter enabled to further understand their successes, issues, and coping mechanisms. Finally reflective questionnaires at the end of their course provided a global view of their experience. This generated a discussion about the universities' ability to support and maximise learning for this unique group of students, who are very experienced in their field and have great potential, yet who could be considered at risk because of their disadvantaged backgrounds. Although the participants share characteristics with those accounted for in the widening participation discourse, they are not British, don't work or pay fees. They belong to the international population but they are very disadvantaged and most probably first generation literate. By using Bourdieu's field theory, analysing secondary research (Jones E., 2010; Montgomery C., 2010; Basit T. N. and Tomlinson S., 2012) around these themes and comparing them with my findings, these students' voices provide an authentic testimony of the sometimes conflicting constructions of their confrontation with the deficit discourse of the academic audience. This study offers students' unique accounts and insights into equality, diversity and inclusive practices within UK educational institutions.

This thesis presents a case study of the understandings of internationalisation of higher education at a UK university. The study elicited views from individuals in diverse management positions at the university, particularly in relation to the university’s internationalisation strategy document. Prior research in the field of internationalisation of higher education has largely focused on international students’ experiences or patterns of their mobility. As far as policy is concerned, there has been an emphasis on the commercial and diplomatic values of the ‘education export industry’. Internationalisation has also been seen in terms of ‘international activities’, the ‘international market’ and the expanding mass access to higher education. The research reported herein is particularly important in the sense that it provides insight into how the term internationalisation is understood from diverse positions within the university management and how these interpretations influence approaches to the implementation of the university’s internationalisation strategy. As a qualitative study, using in-depth interviews as the key data collection approach, the research is unusual in its challenging of interpretations of internationalisation that have previously been largely researched through surveys and questionnaires. The research and its findings take the concept of internationalisation away from the practices of the institution and into the accounts of the individuals who manage it. Findings of the research include the existence of clear differences in views about the meaning and means of implementation of internationalisation, which is widely seen as a goal or end-state rather than as a process. This poses a challenge for the implementation of the centrally-promoted international strategy in the institution concerned.