An Investigation on International Students’ Interactional Strategies

Abstract

International students aiming at proceeding to their higher education studies in new unfamiliar environments are faced with challenges by the communicative and academic demands in the classroom. From a linguistic perspective, students should show a command of meaning-focused interactional abilities (Wright et al., 2022). This study focused on how international students can transform to the kind of communicative meaning-focused processing during academic interactions in seminars and classroom discussions. To obtain an inclusive understanding to international students’ command of effective and naturalistic interactional abilities, this study measured students listening and speaking strategy implementation in classroom settings. A total of 60 international students rated their classroom strategy behaviors with a questionnaire constructed by Wright et al. (2022) after completing their 1-year of postgraduate studies. A comparison between students meaning- focused and form-focused strategy use was conducted where quantitative analysis showed a great implementation of meaning-focused strategies during both listening and speaking, which could be connected to the significance of the 1-year immersion experience in the target-language community. This study further assessed potential impactful factors on students’ interactional competence such as motivational or contextual factors. Correlational analysis showed a significant difference between students who did not enroll in a pre-sessional courses before commencing their postgraduate studies and implementation of form-focused strategies, which indicated a positive influence on attending such courses on students communicative competence. A significant correlation between extrinsic orientation and meaning- focused strategies was also observed though intrinsic orientation was found to be non-significant. Furthermore, frequent L2 interaction and input did not correlate with both types of strategy use, which suggested a lack of successful social interaction by international students. Pedagogical implications are proposed that demonstrate a need for the incorporation of interactional strategies in language pedagogy especially for those who have limited opportunities in experiencing authentic second language communication such as international students learning their L2 in their home countries. A need for boosting students’ intrinsic orientations is also vital for the purpose of facilitating their positive attitude towards the L2.