Chinese postgraduate students’ English academic writing in Australia: Negotiating practices and identities

Chinese international students encounter various challenges in developing their academic writing capabilities in English when studying in Australian universities. This narrative-based qualitative case study explores the English academic writing practices that five Chinese postgraduate students (including the researcher) from Australian universities enacted during their candidature, highlighting the ways in which they negotiated their research-writer identity. The study shows that these students engaged in a range of dialogic activities to revise and refine their writing, and it identifies a number of factors which mediated their attempts to develop their writing skills and their cultural and academic identity