Worlds apart

Representing multilingual international students’ experiences of sociocultural adjustment through pictures

Abstract

This paper explores the experiences of sociocultural adjustment of four multilingual international students who speak English as an additional language (EAL) at a Canadian university. International students have been associated with negative images of failure and disruption to higher education on the basis of the hierarchy of cultures that privileges local and western knowledge. Multilingual EAL international students in particular have been broadly characterised as deficient speakers of English considering their non-native proficiency. From this point of view, multilingual international students tend to experience a kind of double deficit as they are compared to both local and native-speaker students. By employing interviews and photographs, this paper seeks to understand and represent the experiences of sociocultural adjustment of the four students and provides an emic, balanced account of each student’s journey which also takes into account the ways in which the students exercised agency. Findings demonstrate the complexity of the international student experience and the importance of meaningful social interaction for multilingual international students to feel included in their communities. Photographs depict experiences from the students’ perspectives which the students considered representative of positive sociocultural adjustment, but also of challenges in the same domain. This paper concludes with insights related to improving the sociocultural adjustment experiences of multilingual international students.