Personal tutorials are an essential feature of student support in British universities, and therefore they are duplicated on British overseas campuses. It appears that Chinese students are reluctant to seek help when they experience personal difficulties that affect their engagement with learning and their academic performance. Limited literature…

Community-oriented education has witnessed an increasing interest in online service-learning opportunities. Digital Learning Companion is an online service-learning project supported by Taiwan's Ministry of Education to give students experiential learning opportunities and practice social responsibility. As part of the initiative, 189 local and…

To support international students using English as a second language, many universities now provide access to one-to-one writing tutorials with language teaching specialists. Although writing tutorials have become widespread, the current study is one of very few investigations into their interactional unfolding. This study examines advice giving…

When using Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) on university modules, international students unfamiliar with such platforms face navigational as well as linguistic barriers. Short, intensive language courses may not spend time on VLE orientation and rationale, with the result that students do not receive clear guidance on exactly how to move…

As in other Anglophone nations, a large percentage of Australia's postgraduate international students come from English as an additional language (EAL) backgrounds, and many require development of their academic language and learning (ALL) capabilities to successfully navigate a higher degree. This paper investigates those capabilities through the…

Academics often treat students' discipline-specific literacy as unproblematic. In doing so they may underestimate the difficulties for university students as they move between subjects of study that may involve different disciplines, language genres and academic practices. This paper describes an initiative aimed at supporting students in reading…

Active participation in university tutorials seems to be commonly argued as one of the learning difficulties of non-English-speaking background (NESB) Asian students enrolled in Western English-speaking universities. These students are often portrayed as being passive in class and this is commonly attributed to their background culture. Using…

This article examines the impact of an adjunct English language tutorial program on the academic performance of first-year Architecture students. With increasing numbers of international students enrolling in Australian universities, language and academic skills programs have shifted from generic to more discipline-specific models; however, there…

This paper explores the challenges facing supervisors of international postgraduate students at the dissertation stage of the masters programme. The central problems of time pressure, language difficulties, a lack of critical analysis and a prevalence of personal problems among international students are discussed. This paper makes recommendations…

The University of Adelaide investigated the quality of student's written expression in all departments. As a result, four pilot studies were initiated: tutor process; specific tutoring process; booklet process; and non-native speakers' tutoring. (LBH)

A study of 170 foreign university students in the Netherlands shows that while their success rate was similar to native students', it took them more time to complete examinations, and language proficiency and home-country selection procedures were major factors in achievement. Implications for foreign student policy are explored, and a mentor…

The two issues of the journal for teachers of English as a second language in Japan include these articles: "What Do JTEs Really Want?" (Wendy F. Scholefield); "Do EFL Learners Make Instrumental Inferences When Reading? Some Evidence from Implicit Memory Tests" (Suzanne Collins, Hidetsugu Tajika); "Function and Structure…