This article explores non-native English-speaking students' emotional security and dignity responses to their English language proficiency in an Australian context. Confidence is a source of emotional security bolstering dignity. Without it, students lack emotional security, diminishing their dignity when communicating with culturally different others. Emotional security and dignity have a synergistic relationship, in that lack of confidence emotionally threatens one's face, identity and dignity. The study offers insights that help us to understand how international students' psychological well-being is affected by English performance.
This paper looks into the effect of use of international English on non-native students’ dignity in Australian academic and social contexts. The study was undertaken through in-depth interviews with 28 participants from 13 countries. The results partly revealed that there was neither speech convergence nor culture convergence between non-native and native speakers. When native speakers linguistically converged towards non-native speakers, it appeared to backfire as mocking behavior. There was an expectation that host tutors, lecturers and classmates would adjust their speech to a level accommodating non-native speakers, but they did not. Failure to effectively converge linguistically and culturally led to failure in intergroup communication. The failure concomitantly affected participants’ self-worth, motivation and identity in a way that diminished their dignity and motivation, impinging on their identity.
Both internationalization of higher education and use of English as a global language (EGL) coexist, for the latter is a vital tool to attain the former and vice versa. Although the former came into existence in non-native English-speaking countries in Europe, and the latter became the major medium of instruction at universities with the de facto ‘extraterritorial’ lingua franca, research into international students’ issues has mainly been conducted in English-speaking countries. This paper, therefore, aims to explore such value and use of EGL in a higher education internationalization context in Bulgaria. With the qualitative research approach, two themes emerge, answering two research questions. The results collected from 13 students from European and former Soviet backgrounds offer insights into linguistic, cultural, and psychological challenges international students tend to encounter as well as determinants that impact their adjustment.
This study aimed to investigate the Chinese undergraduate students’ attitudes toward learning an online English course through MOOC from affective, behavioral and cognitive dimensions and whether MOOC features and Chinese cultural values influenced their attitudes. The quantitative results, collected from 380 Chinese students at a private university in Beijing selected through stratified random sampling, revealed that they had positive attitudes toward learning the online English course from both three dimensions at a high level and that both MOOC features and Chinese cultural values influenced their positive attitudes at a high level. The qualitative findings, garnered from 18 of them, also supported the quantitative results in that the students preferred studying English on asynchronous and synchronous platforms, providing them with their own learning space, non-face-to-face communication with the lecturer, and a cultural sense of face keeping, concurrently allowing them to learn online English actively and perceptually improve their English skills. Valuable insights for Chinese lecturers of English were provided and replicated studies in different contexts were recommended for future research.
The present era of globalization has witnessed the influence of use of global English between non-native and native speakers giving rise to a variety of accented speech. In this paper, it is argued that when these two groups interact through the medium of English, there is a sense of power attached to non-native interlocutors’ ability to communicate with culturally different others. Their sense of power appears to be influenced by their intrapersonal and interpersonal perceptions of the ability to speak English like a native, which mirrors how they want to present their face or identity when they socially and academically interact with culturally different others. Their intrapersonal and interpersonal perceptions of failure to communicate in English will in turn affect their psychological wellbeing. The argument is based on an empirical study, which was undertaken in an Australian context. Fifteen international postgraduate students from non-native English and culturally diverse backgrounds voluntarily participated in this study
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