Method

Design

A pilot study (semi-structured interview) was firstly conducted with Chinese students at the university. The reason for choosing Chinese students as participants at the first place was mainly due to the relative high proportion of Chinese students at the university. According to UKCISA (2018), since 2012/13 the number of entrants from China each year has exceeded the number from all EU countries combined. Secondly, in a follow-up study more interviews were carried out with other international students. The protocol of the pilot study and the followed-up study was similar. However, in terms of communication difficulties, the

interview questions of pilot study were focused on the communication in general intercultural settings, whereas follow-up interviews were focused particularly on the interaction with native speakers. As the researcher’s mother tongue is Mandarin, the interviews with Chinese students were conducted in Mandarin to eliminate the language barrier. The interviews were

comparable, the original audio of the interviews and translated transcripts were reviewed and agreed on by an English-Mandarin bilingual student in the department of Psychology.

Given that the rest of the interviewees were from different ethnic background and had different mother tongue, the interviews were conducted in English. All the interviews were transcribed and analysed by thematic analysis (Clark & Braun, 2015). Preliminary coding themes as well as subcategories were created to analyse the data. The frequency of each theme was counted.

Participants

In total, 48 international students participated in the interview, which includes 20 Chinese students from the pilot group and 28 other international students from follow-up group. There were 31 females and 17 males. 22 of them were from the course Transcultural Communication (who were interviewed after the course). 28 were from Asian countries (China mainland, Hong Kong and Japan); 20 were from European countries (e.g., Germany, France, Denmark etc.). A detailed description about the participants was shown in Table 3.2.

Table 3. 2 Interview participants N=48 (F=31, M=17)

Procedure

All the interviews were semi-structured in order to follow up interesting and important issues that came up during the interview. Each interview lasted around 10 to 20 minutes and consisted of two main sections. All interviews opened with icebreaking questions on basic personal information (e.g., what are you studying? How long have you been in the UK?). Then the interview moved on to the main questions—how do you feel about your time so far in the UK? Is there any problem or difficulty? Participants were asked to give details or examples of the problems they mentioned. For the follow-up group, question focusing on communication with native speakers were particularly asked (e.g., how is your interaction with native students? Is there any difference when you speak to them and other international students?) The full protocol for both interviews is presented in the Appendix C.

Pilot Group N=20 (F=10 M=10) Follow-up Group N=28 (F=21 M=17)

Factors Description Number &

Percentage

Factors Description Number &

Percentage

Nationality Chinese 20 (100%) Nationality Asian

European

8 (28.6%) 20 (71.4%) Education Level Undergraduate

Master Ph.D.

1 (5%) 13 (65%) 6 (30%)

Education Level Undergraduate

Master Ph.D. Not doing degree 21 (75%) 5 (17.8%) 1 (3.6%) 1 (3.6%) Length of staying in the UK ≤ 3 months 4 to 12 months Over 12 months 1 (5%) 13 (65%) 6 (30%) Length of staying in the UK ≤ 3 months 4 to 12 months Over 12 months 12 (42.8%) 15 (53.6%) 1 (3.6%) Previous intercultural experience Yes No 2 (10%) 18 (90%) Previous intercultural experience Yes No 9 (32.1%) 19 (67.9%)

Thematic analysis was used after all interviews were transcribed and translated into English. As reviewed in Chapter 2, it is a method for identifying, analysing and reporting patterns (themes) within data. It is suitable to use for the research questions focusing on experiences, understanding and perceptions, influencing factors, practice, representation and construction (Clarke & Braun, 2015). As the interview questions were mainly about

participants’ experience in the UK, thematic analysis was considered to be a suitable method for data analysis. Similar work using this approach could be seen in Young and Schartner (2014) who explored the experience of postgraduate international students’ adjustment at on UK university. Although this method is data-driven, thematic analysis needs to be conducted under certain theoretically-informed frameworks. In this research, the framework is the assumption that language barrier, academic adaptation and social communication difficulties might be the major challenges as identified in the Background section to this chapter.

Guided by Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology (Braun & Clarke, 2008), the data were read and reread several times in order to generate an initial list of ideas (codes) about what is in the data and what is interesting about them. After the researcher became familiar with the data, they were read again with specific questions in mind (in particular, the three main difficulties—language barrier, academic adaptation and social communication). Based on the semantic and latent meaning of the data, different codes were compared and combined throughout the whole data set to form an overarching theme. At this stage, a collection of candidate themes and sub-themes, and all extracts of data were coded. For the candidate themes that appeared to form a coherent pattern, they were defined and named as a theme.

In this study, using Nvivo (Bazeley & Jackson, 2013), the participants’ comments were initially sorted into six broad analytical categories (or themes). A comment was classified as “language barrier” if it identified an aspect of language as problematic (e.g., “I could not

describe language problems in the academic setting (e.g., “it is difficult for me to understand what the teacher says in the lecture”). Such comment was classified in the “language barrier” category instead of “education adaptation”. The fine line between these two categories was the latter focused more on the general academic environment such as teaching style or education system whereas the former focused on the students’ linguistic proficiency only. Likewise, the category “communicative difficulties in the intercultural setting” focused on the comments that on the process of the communication such as the content of the conversation, which means the influence of language was not considered in this category. For the category “culture shock”, the exact term “culture shock” was not asked during the interview as it might sound novel to the participants. Any comment related to their experience as culture shock or the timeline regarding to the culture shock (e.g. “at the beginning of my staying, I felt lonely and alone”) was classified in this category.

The typology is presented in full in the Results section, together with frequencies of occurrence (see Table 3.3). Frequency of occurrence of each category was then assessed.