find themselves at the sharp end of, arguably being seen as the physical embodiment of the marketisation of higher education across the globe.
As the drive to internationalise increases, it is necessary to stop and question which of the pictures described above (if any) is the current reality, and to highlight how the shift is impacting both students and staff as they work and study together.
Who is an International Student?
There is a large body of literature debating the terminology and implications behind the label ‘international student’ (Baker, 2016; Carroll, 2015; Margolis, 2016; Montgomery, 2010; Ryan, 2011). Many are now arguing that any student studying at tertiary level could and should be viewed and view themselves as an international or a global student (Leaske, 2013; Jenkins, 2013). Recent studies indicating the learning gain and increased employability attached to a period of study abroad (Universities UK, 2017) have added weight to the arguments around the concept of ‘internationalisation at home’ (see Beelan & Jones, 2015; Leaske, 2013), where opportunities for an international experience are provided to all students. From this perspective, all students, whether at university in their country of birth/citizenship or not can and should see themselves as international. Here, being an international student provides opportunity that is not currently available to all; the aim to open up the opportunity of global mobility to others is based within concepts of widening participation and education for social justice.
However, within the UK HE context, the label ‘international student’ is used institutionally as a financial differentiation, denoting those students who are expected to pay higher fees because they hold a passport from a country outside the EU. University websites include pages specifically for ‘International’ students and include advice on, for example, visa applications, police registration and qualification equivalencies. In this sense, the label is simply of administrative use, allowing institutions to signpost those who need it towards the relevant information necessary to allow them to gain access to their chosen site of education.
Although the administrative differentiation, working along financial lines, separates students into groups based on whether they are ‘Home’, ‘EU’ or ‘International’, these lines become blurred and almost irrelevant once learning begins. This differentiation does not, crucially, neatly separate those students for whom English is an additional language from those who use English as their dominant or only language. It also does not separate those who have studied within an educational culture which is the same or similar to that of their current University. It is at this point that the label ‘international’ when applied to students studying in the United Kingdom can take on multiple shades of meaning. At times it is used to describe any student coming from outside the UK, but more commonly it is used as shorthand for any student who is studying in English when English is an additional language. At this point, the labels ‘home’ and ‘international’ become interchangeable with native (NS) and non-native speaker (NNS).
However, the terms native and non-native speaker have been also widely critiqued within linguistic research literature (Kachru, 1982; Holliday, 2010, 2011; Seidlhofer, 2011) and do not provide a clear distinction between those students who, for example, speak one language at home (their ‘mother tongue’), yet have been educated in a second language and are proficient in both – often with greater expertise in writing their ‘second’ language as it tends to be the language of their education. When simplistically understood, the terms can, at their worst, be racist. At its best, the ‘commonsense view’ (Davies, 2003: 24) of a native speaker does not incorporate or question the multiple terms that should be implied, including the multiplicity of Englishes used across the globe ranging from English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) which involves communication in English that is negotiated between individuals who are all ‘non-native’ speakers of the language, to the concepts of bilingual codeswitching, translanguaging or even to regional dialect (see Canagarajah, 2013; Jenkins, 2013, 2015; Mauranen, 2012; Seidlhofer, 2011). All of these ‘Englishes’, whilst valid, may contribute to a student encountering difficulty in accessing certain elements of a UK university curriculum (Lillis et al., 2015; Ivanic, 1998). There have been some recent empirical and pedagogically oriented studies on ELF and translingualism (for example, Flowerdew, 2015; McIntosh et al. 2017), although there remains disagreement as to whether this is simply a reframing that ignores prior research findings (see Matsuda, 2014; Tardy, 2017 and Tribble, 2017). Davies (2003: 8) suggests that native-speaker membership is one of ‘self-ascription not of something being given’ and is largely a sociolinguistic construct relating to levels of confidence and identity. It is thus, he suggests, a boundary that is ‘as much created by non-native speakers as by native speakers themselves’ (2003: 9). However it is understood, the binary use of the native and non-native speaker label is clearly as problematic and contested (if not more so) as the term international student.
Thus, when using the term ‘International student’ it is important to recognise the power structures and cultural capital (both in terms of opportunities and prejudices) that lie behind it. It is not benign and can be used to separate out and ‘other’ specific groups of people as well as to provide access to support. There is also no one label that can be used for this group of students that is not seen as denoting some kind of deficit differential, as any label must by its very nature be seen to separate one group from another, and measure one group against what is currently accepted as a standard norm.
There is not, therefore, one term which succinctly defines the students that this book is mainly concerned with, other than to suggest that at one time or another it is likely to relate to all students regardless of their nominal linguistic background. However, for the sake of ease, I will use the terms International student and, more frequently, EAL (English as an additional language) student1 to denote those students who have traditionally accessed English for Academic Purposes classes and whose difficulty in accessing or voicing their understanding of the knowledge base of their discipline is more likely to be perceived as being due to their English language proficiency. Most commonly, but not always, these students enter University in the United Kingdom with an IELTS2 level of 6.5 overall, or B2 on the CEFR3.
Whilst these students have diverse profiles, motivations and needs, it is that they are using English as an additional language, as a medium of instruction, for academic purposes, that defines them as a distinct group. It is this language use that is perceived by the students themselves and the staff who work with them as the main barrier to being able to access their education. In most UK HE institutions, the work to reduce or bridge this barrier is done by English for Academic Purposes practitioners.
The Position of English for Academic Purposes
English for Academic Purposes (herein EAP) is widely defined as ‘the teaching of English with the specific aim of helping learners to study, conduct research or teach in that language’ (Flowerdew & Peacock, 2001a: 8) and more recently as the means of giving ‘students access to ways of knowing: to the discourses which have emerged to represent events, ideas and observations in the academy’ (Hyland, 2018: 390). In theory, then, EAP practitioners work to enable international, EAL students and, less frequently, staff to access the content of their disciplines and bridge the language gap that is perceived to be the main cause of academic and disciplinary exclusion for this group of students.
However, while there is little disagreement over what EAP teaching is (or at least should be), there is less consensus over how, when and where EAP teaching should take place, or indeed who an EAP practitioner should be. Tribble, for example, has suggested that ‘accounts of what is meant by EAP’ are ‘fragmented and sometimes contradictory’ (2009: 400); Ding and Bruce (2017) have provided a comprehensive overview of the marginal position that EAP practitioners currently occupy within University structures and suggest that this lack of status is, to a degree, self-inflicted. While there is a broad knowledge base for EAP to draw on – which Ding and Bruce suggest specifically are the research areas of: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL); genre theory; corpus linguistics;
