Reading against all odds: creative coping strategies of international students in HE

Lists

Download

Preview

Reading against all odds creative coping strategies of international students in HE.pdf - Published Version (2MB) | Preview

Available under license: Creative Commons Attribution

[thumbnail of IJBEB_WithAuthorDetails_accepted210424.pdf]

IJBEB_WithAuthorDetails_accepted210424.pdf - Accepted Version (433kB)

Restricted to Repository staff only

Tools

Vicary, A. and Treffers-Daller, J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6575-6736 (2024) Reading against all odds: creative coping strategies of international students in HE. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 27 (8). pp. 1128-1141. ISSN 1747-7522 doi: 10.1080/13670050.2024.2345698

Abstract/Summary

Many overseas students in Higher Education in the UK struggle to understand the compulsory texts for their course, and obtain lower scores for their modules than their monolingual peers. While the existence of this achievement gap is well established in the literature, little is known about the ways in which overseas students in HE with limited English language and literacy skills meet the challenges posed by the compulsory reading on their course. The current study is novel because we focus on a postgraduate Law module and use a mixed methods approach to studying the relationship between students’ language and literacy profiles and their academic achievement. The results show that students’ vocabulary sizes did not provide enough lexical coverage for them to understand the set texts and that the language and literacy profiles of our students did not correlate with their module scores. In-depth interviews revealed that students with IELTS scores of 6.0 or lower used ‘creative reading’ strategies such as machine translation, to pass assignments, while staff used ‘compassionate marking’ strategies in the case of struggling writers, which means module scores for some students were likely inflated. Implications for admissions tutors and teachers in HE are formulated at the end.

Altmetric Badge

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/116129
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Language and Applied Linguistics
Uncontrolled Keywords	academic achievement, vocabulary size, reading comprehension, Law, IELTS, assessment
Publisher	Taylor & Francis
Download/View statistics	View download statistics for this item

Download Statistics

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

Deposit Details

Date Deposited:	25 Apr 2024 14:32	Date item deposited into CentAUR
Last Modified:	23 Mar 2025 02:02	Date item last modified

References

Bialystok, E., and Luk, G. 2012. “Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual adults.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(2): 397-401. Breeze, R., 2013. “Lexical bundles across four legal genres.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 18(2): 229-253. Chung, T. M., and I.S.P. Nation. 2003. “Technical vocabulary in specialised texts. ” Reading in a Foreign Language, 15(2): 103–116. Cobb, T. 2020. Compleat Lexical Tutor vs 8.3. https://www.lextutor.ca/ Conklin, K., and N. Schmitt. 2008. “Formulaic Sequences: Are they Processed More Quickly than Nonformulaic Language by Native and Nonnative Speakers?” Applied Linguistics 29 (1): 72–89. Coxhead, A., Nation, P. and D. Sim. 2015. “Measuring the vocabulary size of native speakers of English in New Zealand secondary schools.” New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 50(1): 121–135. Crossley, S.A., D.B. Alan, and D.S. Macnamara. 2011. “Text Readability and Intuitive Simplification: A Comparison of Readability Formulas.” Reading in a Foreign Language 23 (1): 84-101 Daller, M. H., and D.Phelan. 2013. “Predicting International Student Study Success.” Applied Linguistics Review 4(1): 173-193. Daller, M., and Y. Wang. 2017. “Predicting Study Success of International Students.” Applied Linguistics Review 8 (4): 355-374. Giampieri, P. 2016. “Is the European legal English legalese-free.” Italian Journal of Public Law, 8: 424-440. Gyllstad, H., L. Vilkaitė and N. Schmitt. 2015. “Assessing vocabulary size through multiple-choice formats.” ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 166(2): 278–306. Hu, M. and I.S.P. Nation. 2000. “Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension.” Reading in a Foreign Language, 13: 403–430. Ingram, D. and A. Bayliss. 2007. “IELTS as a predictor of academic language performance, Part 1.” In International English Language Testing System (IELTS) Research Reports 2007: Volume 7 (pp. 1-68). [Canberra: IELTS Australia and British Council. Jeon, E. H., and J. Yamashita. 2014. “L2 reading comprehension and its correlates: A meta-analysis.” Language Learning, 64(1): 160–212. Khalifa, H., and C. J. Weir. 2009. Examining Reading : Research and Practice in Assessing Second Language Reading. Cambridge University Press. Kilgarriff, A. 2020. Compare corpora | Sketch Engine. Sketch Engine. https://www.sketchengine.eu/guide/compare-corpora/ Larson, M. 2017. Thresholds, Text Coverage, Vocabulary Size, and Reading Comprehension in Applied Linguistics. Doctoral dissertation, Open Access Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington. Laufer, B., and G.C. Ravenhorst-Kalovski. 2010. “Lexical threshold revisited: Lexical text coverage , learners’ vocabulary size and reading comprehension.” Reading in a Foreign Language, 22(1), 15–30. Milton, J., and J. Treffers-Daller. 2013. “Vocabulary size revisited: the link between vocabulary size and academic achievement.” Applied Linguistics Review, 4(1): 151–172. Nation, I. S. P. 2013. Learning Vocabulary in Another Language (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Nation, I. S. P., and D. Beglar, D. 2007. “A Vocabulary Size Test.” The Language Teacher 31 (7): 9–13. Nicita, A., 2014. “The legacy of R. Coase (1910–2013): toward a theory of institutional 'moving equilibrium'?.” International Review of Economics, 61(2): 93-108. Pearson, W. S. 2021. “The Predictive Validity of the Academic IELTS Test: A Methodological Synthesis.” ITL-International Journal of Applied Linguistics 172 (1): 85-120. Schmitt, N., and D. Schmitt, D. 2014. “A Reassessment of Frequency and Vocabulary Size in L2 Vocabulary Teaching.” Language Teaching 47 (4): 484–503. Schmitt, N., X. Jiang, and W. Grabe. 2011. “The percentage of words known in a text and reading comprehension.” Modern Language Journal, 95(1): 26–43. Siyanova-Chanturia, A., K. Conklin, K. and W.J.B.van Heuven. 2011. “Seeing a phrase “ time and again” matters: The role of phrasal frequency in the processing of multiword sequences.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 37(3): 776–784. Stoeckel, T., S. McLean, and P. Nation. 2021. “Limitations of size and levels tests of written receptive vocabulary knowledge.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 43(1): 181–203. Sullivan, M., A. Kelly and P. McLaughlan. 2023. “ChatGPT in higher education: Considerations for academic integrity and student learning.” Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching 6(1): 1-10. Thorpe, A., M. Snell, S. Davey‐Evans, and R. Talman. 2017. “Improving the academic performance of non‐native English‐speaking students: The contribution of pre‐sessional English language programmes.” Higher Education Quarterly, 71(1): 5-32. Trenkic, D., and R. Hu. 2021. “Teaching to the test: The effects of coaching on English proficiency scores for university entry.” Journal of the European Second Language Association, 5(1): 1–15. Trenkic, D., and M. Warmington. 2018. Language and literacy skills of home and international university students: How different are they, and does it matter?” Bilingualism, 22(2): 349–365. Zhang, S., and X. Zhang. 2020. “The relationship between vocabulary knowledge and L2 reading/listening comprehension: A meta-analysis.” Language Teaching Research 26(4): 696-725.

University Staff: Request a correction | Centaur Editors: Update this record

Search Google Scholar