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‘It’s Totally Different’: Undergraduate Chinese Students Learning to Write in a New Zealand University

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Researching Intercultural Learning

Abstract

This chapter examines the responses of Chinese international students to the writing demands of their undergraduate study of business in a New Zealand university. While writing in English was only one among many planes in which they experienced an enormous amount of intercultural learning, it was significant as a major means by which they demonstrated their university learning to their teachers and entered into some sort of communication with them. The chapter reveals that in spite of these learners’ growing understanding of, and even in some cases alignment with, the values of the university, there were occasions when they did not adopt ways of writing favoured within this host culture of learning, as a result of either inability or strategic choice.

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© 2013 Gillian Skyrme

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Skyrme, G. (2013). ‘It’s Totally Different’: Undergraduate Chinese Students Learning to Write in a New Zealand University. In: Jin, L., Cortazzi, M. (eds) Researching Intercultural Learning. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291646_9

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