Context
Every year thousands of overseas students cross the British borders with a view of studying at the university. Only in 2009/10 did 281,000 non-UK students undertake such study, with Chinese learners constituting the largest and still growing proportion (HESA, 2011). Both statistics can be confirmed by my observations of the growing student numbers on the pre-sessional courses at the University of Glasgow. For the students, however, it is not only a geographical crossover as transitions in other domains are required too.
One of them links to language-related boundaries. The minimum requirement to enter the country is capped at IELTS 5/CEFR B1 (UK Border Agency, 2011), which describes the writing competence as the ability to write ‘straightforward connected texts on a range of familiar topics’ (Europass, 2011). Nonetheless, most overseas students desire to achieve minimally 6.5 on the IELTS scale, which is a borderline between a competent and good user and is deemed as ‘probably acceptable for linguistically less demanding academic courses’ (IELTS, 2009). At this level, in terms of overall writing ability, the learner can write ‘clear, detailed texts on a variety of subjects, including complex ones’ (Europass, 2011). So, within one language macroskill, the student, in order to ascertain academic success, has to make significant progress in the complexity of the language used (form, organisation, style to mention just a few components), something that for various reasons to be discussed later creates a tension in them, as illustrated in the vignette at the beginning.Another transformation pertains to a new academic culture which might require a different skillset or personal qualities. For example, the Graduate Attributes Matrix devised by the University of Glasgow lists numerous characteristics the students are expected to develop. Independent and critical thinking feature strongly among them, translatable, under transferable skills, into application of creative, imaginative and innovative thinking to problem solving (University of Glasgow, 2011).
It seems to me that some of the current approaches to writing at university, especially those grounded in positivism and realism, might be suppressing creativity (Toohey, 1999). Expository papers often ask students to regurgitate the library knowledge as a series of objective arguments analysing a clear thesis (Toohey, 1999:47; Ulmer, 2003:xii), an example of potentially elitist discourse formations (Dickson, 2003). This might be particularly exclusionary in case of Chinese students due to their culturally idiosyncratic view of self rooted in Confucianism, which might pose a conceptual difficulty when attempting to draft a clear thesis (Connor, 1991). The Chinese are also said to display a propensity to include narration, appeal to history and tradition in an effort to enliven their discourse, a distractive practice in the eyes of a Western reader. This shows the scale of a problem for a Chinese student trying to integrate into the British academic culture. Digital English is not advocating leniency but tentatively proposing a different approach to teaching academic writing to such learners, an approach which aims to respect their cultural histories and complex subject positions and by doing so creatively ask them to call those subjectivities to account (Ulmer, 2003).
Move on to read about inspiration and themes.