Study abroad (SA) has recently become an increasingly popular option for language learners who wish to engage in an immersive educational experience while living in a different culture, but not all SA programmes are created equal. Length of time can vary significantly, from a days or weeks up to a year or more spent in the target culture, and this…

This reflective paper shares the experiences of a higher education professional living and working abroad and the long-term impacts of those experiences on their self-authorship journey through reflection ten years later. The story of this reflection focuses on how cultural differences and community ties helped to facilitate growth and…

Informed by translingual practice [Canagarajah, S. 2013a. "Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations." New York: Routledge] and poststructuralist conceptualisation of identity [Norton, B. 2000. "Identity and Language Learning: Gender, Ethnicity and Educational Change." "TESOL Quarterly" 35…

This article provides qualitative information chronicling the study-abroad experiences of eight Erasmus+ students. Data were obtained from the analysis of focus-group discussions, e-journal narratives, plus background and language contact questionnaires. Combined, such data illustrate the participants' discursive positions on their socialisation…

Motivation is a foremost aspect in language learning and has been extensively studied in the field of SLA due to its important contribution to pedagogical implications. However, SLA scholars/researchers have overwhelmingly preoccupied specifically with Asian students such as Japanese and/or Chinese (Gong et al, 2020; Kikuchi, 2019). This ignores…

The PhD students in this study create a sense of being at home as part of their own way of being themselves. Their programme requires and allows considerable autonomy in how they choose to be with the people around them. Different to common expectations of the 'international student', their nationality and its 'culture' being apart from the…

This study contributes to research on the doctoral experience of international students who are parents, and for whom the temporary experience of living elsewhere is both a challenge and a resource for all members of the family. The study investigated how a group of these students positioned themselves to their children's English and home language…

With the development of internationalization in higher education, an increasing number of Sino-Foreign cooperative education institutes have been established in China over the last two decades. These institutes offer English-medium instruction where English is the working language for students to conduct various academic tasks. Based on a case…

This study longitudinally examined the effects of cognitive and sociopsychological individual differences (aptitude, motivation, personality) and the quantity and quality of second language (L2) experience on L2 speech gains in naturalistic settings. We elicited L2 spontaneous speech from 50 Chinese learners of English at the beginning and the end…

Research on identity in teacher education and professionalism has been a significant issue for language teacher educators in terms of their trajectories and career development. Examining identity from contextual perspectives can assist teachers in establishing a professional self in order to facilitate them to better understand and negotiate their…

This study qualitatively explores how studying abroad in an English as a lingua franca context promotes student-sojourners' intercultural awareness (ICA) taking a longitudinal perspective. A group of Catalan/Spanish bilinguals and Turkish-L1 speakers were interviewed regarding their past ERASMUS experiences in terms of ICA following a stimulated…

This dissertation study examines the acculturation experiences of Saudi Arabian students pursuing higher education in the United States. It investigates the relationships among students' acculturation strategies, self-assertion, and academic self-efficacy, while exploring the moderating effects of English proficiency and length of stay. The study…

This study is a critical-autoethnographic exploration of the intellectual trajectories of three international doctoral scholars in an Australian research-intensive university in terms of the development of their academic identities. It looks at the various institutional and discursive forces that influence their academic adjustments and how they…

This paper explores eight Kazakhstani postgraduate students' reflections of their international educational experiences in the UK after their immediate re-entry into Kazakhstan. Special focus was on their language identity development after their one-year stay in the UK. It was informed by Benson et al.'s ([2013]. "Second Language Identity in…

With the rise in the number of international students (ISs) in many Asian universities, some recent research has investigated ISs' linguacultural experience in the new Asian educational hubs. Current research has shown that while English is used as the de facto academic lingua franca in many of these hubs, the local language of the host nation…