Expanding the comfort zones: Divergent practices of host and international university students

ABSTRACT

Host and international students evolve side-by side within the expanding internationalization of higher education. This study takes the complementary perspective of analysing 1,900 host and international students’ experiences at a high-ranking research university in France. We analyse and compare the mobility, language practices and practices related to university life of these two populations interacting within a common higher education setting. Despite common needs of language skills for professional needs, our results demonstrate significant differences in their declared concerns and practices, suggesting that each population remains largely within their diverging ‘comfort zones’. We find a lack of social interaction between host and international students, producing a two-way deficit, where many host students miss an opportunity to benefit from practicing foreign languages and discovering new socio-cultural perspectives, while many international students miss an opportunity for local social and institutional support, known to reduce stress. We conclude with suggestions for adapting university policies to remedy this deficiency.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic mobility
• international students
• France
• language practices
• university life

Acknowledgements

We thank Laura Abou Haidar, Sandrine Courchinoux, and Marinette Matthey, for their participation in the construction of the original survey questions and a report internal to the Université Grenoble Alpes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Laura M. Hartwell, PhD, is Full Professor of English at the Université Toulouse 1 Capitole and member of the laboratory LAIRDIL. Her major research interests lie in the area of English for academic purposes, didactics, and corpus linguistics. Email: [email protected].

Samia Ounoughi, PhD, is Senior Lecturer of English at the Université Grenoble Alpes and member of the laboratory LIDILEM. Her research focuses mainly on discourse analysis about human mobility and space representation, especially in mountainous areas. Email: [email protected].

ORCID

Laura M. Hartwell http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8601-4176

Samia Ounoughi http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9314-4932

Notes

1 Numbers refer to participant's anonymous identifying number.