This paper contributes to an understanding of the ways in which not being bound to the nation of education, in legal and cultural terms, excludes international students. Based on narrative interviews with 20 students from 6 countries, the paper considers a range of difficulties international students encounter in social and educational domains in…

In the past decade, the population of international students enrolling in Chinese colleges and universities has been increasing rapidly, with the students in Asia taking the most portions. Chinese higher education institutions are facing great challenges in their course of internationalization. Therefore the studies on the intercultural adaptation…

While feedback in education is important, formative feedback that leads to improvement in students' learning outcomes and emotional disposition is vital. This argument has been made repeatedly in the Western literature, both by researchers and by students participating in their research in higher education. This paper presents both affective and…

Active citizenship is increasingly being framed in the context of lifelong and life-wide learning. However, research on young people's participation in and experience of different forms of civic practice, particularly in informal settings in different sociocultural contexts, is scarce. Consequently, little is known about how these experiences…

This study discusses the possibility of e-portfolio as a central component of assessment practice in the traditionally exam-oriented context of China's tertiary education. The aim was to listen to learners, and provide them with a voice to analyse their perception of the potential advantages and challenges of introducing a learning-focused…

As the Chinese mainland has transitioned from elite to mass higher education, the race to attend university has escalated to become a race to attend selective universities. This study focuses on rural female university students and explores how they make sense of their higher education admission experiences. We rationalize that the inquiry into…

Qualitative research strategy has been widely adopted by educational researchers in order to improve the quality of their empirical studies. This paper aims to introduce a generic inductive approach, pragmatic and flexible in qualitative theoretical support, by describing its application in a study of non-English major undergraduates' English…

Transitioning from school to university is a major development for learners, often accompanied by difficulties. When overseas students arrive at university for the first time these challenges are multiplied. It is suggested, however, that these difficulties can be mitigated to a certain extent via the use of online social networks. The present…

This paper examines ideologies of American study abroad in politically and culturally "non-Western" countries. Drawing from the theory of orientalism (Said, 1978), we analyze how American public discourse on study abroad for learners of Mandarin and Arabic manifests an orientalist thinking, and how such macro discourse both produces…

The international joint degree program is one of the recent ways of international collaborations in Higher Education. Those programs involve intensive academic collaborations as well as institutional alliance.?Such programs could provide a supportive environment for international students through international partnerships. The article provides a…

In teacher identity research, limited attention has been paid to how pre-service teachers constructed their identities by negotiating with different emotions in their practice. To fill this gap, the present study, drawing upon the approach of narrative inquiry, explores how a student-teacher--Ming--negotiated and navigated conflicting emotions in…

This article explores the real life experience of international students' and the importance of study abroad for their personal and professional development. The empirical data drawn upon for this article came from the author's master's research, with field research conducted in the 2010/2011 academic year. It begins with the study focus and…

The purpose of this study was to explore undergraduate Chinese international students' perceptions about their classroom experiences in the United States institutions of higher education. Double consciousness, introduced by W.E.B. Du Bois, was used as the theoretical framework for this study. After analyzing the 15 interviews to Chinese…

Using the lens of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, activity theory, and Engeström's activity systems analysis, this qualitative study explores students' experiences in the context of a sixteen-week transpacific collaboration between seven students at Northern Illinois University (NIU) and seven students from Shandong Normal University (SDNU),…

Although international students annually contribute billions of dollars to the US economy, meaningful intercultural interaction between international students, peers, and faculty is often missing at US host campuses. Feelings of isolation, loneliness, and alienation are pervasive among international students at US campuses; these feelings can…