Academic identities of international students in a pathway program: perceptions of students and teachers

This dissertation presents a case study exploring the development of academic identities of international students who are non-native-English speakers (NNES) in a for-profit pathway program in Australia designed to facilitate the transition of such students into mainstream university. While the term academic identity is usually interpreted as the identity of academics within the research literature, this thesis applies a different lens to focus on how international students start to develop a sense of their academic self at the outset of their academic studies. The conceptual framework features Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, 1974, 1978; Tajfel & Turner, 1979; Turner et al., 1987) which proposes members in a group acquire status as a consequence of intergroup comparison on the basis of their taking on the positive prototypical preferences of their ingroup, thereby facilitating the acquisition of a robust self-concept or social (academic) identity. The dissertation draws on three lines of empirical data using a mixed methods approach: student surveys, student focus groups, and one-on-one interviews with teachers. Thematic analysis has been applied to qualitative data, and Excel and SPSS software utilised for quantitative data. The dissertation argues that the commercialised framework of the pathway program has specific consequences that can potentially jeopardise the development of an authentic academic identity as students tentatively segue from a learner identity to a more sophisticated academic one. 

The significance of the research is its focus on an under-researched area of the international students’ academic journey, namely the pre-university pathway program which is often their first exposure to a Western style academic environment. As such, it is a defining, high-risk transition period that impacts their future academic success. On a broader level, this dissertation contributes another discrete category of International Student Mobility (ISM) – pre-university mobility – to seminal research in this area (Cairns, 2014a, 2014b, 2015, 2017) to complement already identified categories such as diploma mobility and post-diploma mobility.