Enculturating NNES Engineering Students in Taiwan: A Comparative Case Study

Abstract

This study aims to investigate how two NNES (non-native English speaking) Taiwanese engineering graduate students became enculturated through various disciplinary practices of their disciplines. In particular, it focused on the learning challenges they had encountered during their overall process of disciplinary enculturation through the lens of legitimate peripheral participation. This study was conducted for the fall semester over the academic year of 2017 and 2018 at two universities in Taiwan. Multiple sources of data such as transcripts of student interviews, writing samples, and lab observations were collected and analysed. The findings indicated that the overall English proficiency of these students played a crucial role in their overall process of disciplinary enculturation. In addition, both students longed for more guidance from their disciplinary mentors/instructors regarding how to present their research and write for journal papers more effectively in English. Moreover, participants encountered varying degrees of writing challenges in writing for scholarly publications. The findings supported previous studies that NNES students often struggled most with various linguistic challenges relevant to their English language proficiency and they needed more guidance from advisors to facilitate their acquisition of genres in their target discipline.