International Students' Challenges, Strategies and Future Vision

Study abroad is now both an international industry and an experience that can have a deep impact on students’ linguistic, cultural and personal development. This book explores ‘the social turn’ in the fields of study abroad and language learning strategies. The longitudinal qualitative study reported in this volume investigates the international educational experiences of Arab university students from diverse countries (Iraq, Libya, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the United Arab Emirates) and represents one of the few empirical studies to capture an in-depth understanding of the study abroad experiences of newly-arrived international students in higher education. Particular attention is paid to their changing learning goals, underlying motivations and strategy uses during their attendance on both short and long academic programmes in a study abroad context. It also examines their past language learning experiences in their homelands retrospectively. Readers will gain a better understanding of international students’ study abroad experiences in terms of their expectations, aspirations, diverse difficulties and the strategies they deploy to deal with these difficulties.

The highly engaging narratives of international students' language learning efforts in this book help us appreciate how these students strategically maneuvered themselves in complex, shifting contexts to pursue what they desired to have. It is sure to inspire language learning strategy researchers with its rich insights for further research., The research in this book includes a valuable set of case studies of how learning strategies are used across contexts and stages of study. The book takes a broad, holistic perspective on a set of learners with some commonalities (for example, Arab ethnicity), without exoticizing them. This is well supported with further readings for researchers and also implications for teachers and others working in education.

Anas Hajar is a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR. His research interests include language learning strategies from sociocultural perspectives, L2 motivation and identity and higher education.