Learner Autonomy and Social Networks in Language Learning during Study Abroad: Autonomous Chinese-Speaking Sojourners’ Linguistic and Social Experiences in a UK University

Abstract

This multiple case study employs ethnographic methods to track how six autonomous Chinese-speaking sojourners at a UK university seek out the affordances offered by their non-Chinese-speaking social networks to achieve their language learning and other personal goals. It adopts an ecological perspective (e.g. Palfreyman 2014) to investigate how the construct of language learner autonomy is mediated in different social eco-systems.

Chinese-speaking sojourners are currently the largest proportion of international students across UK universities (HESA 2019). However, it is reported by Wu (2014) that these sojourners, for the most part, have a low level of social integration into different communities in the UK, and they tend to stay with their co-nationals. This lack of integration has given rise to the notion of the ‘Chinese phantom’ (Urban Dictionary 2018), a stereotype where Chinese-speaking sojourners are perceived as a hidden group by other international students. Researchers such as Gu (2011a) and Wu (2014) have also commented on diaspora Chinese as a hidden community in the UK or other western countries.

Nevertheless, there is a lack of research investigating any successful Chinese-speaking sojourners who exhibit their autonomy through standing out of their co-nationals and participating in non-Chinese speaking social networks during their study abroad to have linguistic and non-linguistic encounters.

To bridge this gap, data is gathered through 15 semi-structured narrative interviews, 8 participant observations followed by 8 observation interviews in 4 different social settings with six main participants. On top of that, this research also conducts 542 online questionnaires and 20 semi-structured narrative interviews as additional contextual data. This type of contextual data gives insight into background information and common features of Chinese-speaking sojourners at a UK university.

The findings extracted from the six main participants predominantly identify a set of newly-discovered strategies employed by autonomous sojourners which are not recorded in the existing taxonomies of Language Learning Strategies proposed by Oxford (2013) and Language Use Strategies proposed by Cohen (1996, 2014). The findings show that these autonomous sojourners not only employ the newly-discovered strategies to deal with language issues but also to deal with socio-cultural contexts and identity issues in different social settings. For example, the results show that some autonomous sojourners exercise their agency to self-initially employ a newly observed ‘Concealing Identity Strategy’ to hide their self-perceived atheist identity thus obtaining access into a religious setting which they consider otherwise inaccessible for their language learning.

These newly-discovered strategies can also offer suggestions for universities and trainers in terms of placing more weight on the importance of equipping sojourners with linguistic and also other related intercultural knowledge and skills during their study abroad, which could be seen from the outcomes of this study to highly benefit this cohort of sojourners’ integration in a transnational context.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Xinyang Lu: orcid.org/0000-0001-5587-3114

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