Examining the Cultural Adjustment Experiences of International Students in Writing Dissertations in a UK Campus

Abstract

This qualitative study drew on a larger study which was to explore and understand the experiences of non-native speaker postgraduate students in writing dissertations at one university in the United Kingdom. In this qualitative study, we interviewed four international students from different countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Japan. We identified two main themes pertaining to the challenges in writing dissertations. The first included student-related challenges (technical writing matters, thinking in English, identifying research topics, writing literature review, lack of communicative competence and boredom) and the second focused on s-related challenges (meeting supervisor). To cope with those challenges, the participants have applied a multitude of strategies, such as self-management strategies (reading articles/books, translation strategy, key-point drafting and entertainment) and getting-help strategies (asking supervisor[s], hiring proof-readers and online proofreading service). As an implication of this study, we suggest that the postgraduate students could identify their own challenge as non-native English speakers in writing a good quality dissertation in English and find their own effective strategy to overcome it.