Arab sojourner expectations, academic socialisation and strategy use on a pre-sessional English programme in Britain

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on a phenomenographic investigation of Arab sojourners’ international academic experiences in terms of their expectations, academic socialisation and their strategy use during a ten-week pre-sessional English language course at a UK university. The qualitative data collected from a written narrative and three subsequent semi-structured interviews revealed how the participants’ expectations and strategic learning efforts in the new context were influenced by their learning goals, together with their past language learning experiences. Many held a utopian vision of automatic language development and meaningful interactions with locals once they were in the host environment. The analysis of the data also showed the dominance of highly supportive co-national peers, reluctance to engage in intercultural interactions and a clear preference for “native speaker” tutors. The participants gradually began to identify proximal goals by responding positively to strategies meditated by their writing tutors. They did so because academic writing requirements constitute the main form of assessment in their upcoming postgraduate programmes. The findings of this phenomenographic study have practical implications for the improvement of pre-sessional English courses and also provide directions for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Pre-sessional programmes
• learning strategies
• academic socialisation
• Arab sojourners
• phenomenographic inquiry

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their insightful comments and editorial support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anas Hajar

Anas Hajar is a graduate of Warwick University holding a PhD in English Language Education. He worked as a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow at Warwick, Coventry and Christ Church Universities in the UK and at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong SAR. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Multilingual Education at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. He is particularly interested in motivational issues in language learning and intercultural engagement. He also works in the areas of internationalization and education abroad, language learning strategies and shadow education.