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a range of different aspects of her academic life. From my own notes of the first meeting I had with Mai and her tutor:

       • For the assessment, Mai had generally completed the parts of the paper that required her to follow instructions, copying & pasting sequences from a website. She had not attempted the higher order tasks requiring critical analysis or thought.

      From a further chat over coffee that I had with her, I recorded my surprise at her lack of personal connection with people in her School

       • She cannot remember the names of any of her tutors! She is getting a new personal tutor – she feels that XXX was always too busy to speak to and support her. She asks her for help and she says she doesn’t have the time.

      It is here that many of Mai’s problems seem to lie. Her tutor had, very early on in Semester 1, identified Mai’s need for help and acted quickly to try and get something in place for her. However, this support did not fit properly with Mai’s specific needs or with her timetable and did not seem to meet her expectations of the kind of support she wanted nor from whom it should come. Beyond these actions, the teacher did not make herself available to provide extra help as she did not see this as part of her responsibilities. The tensions between student need and expectations and academic time and expectations, and the tensions between language proficiency and academic content competence all come into play. Mai, it seems, fell between the gaps of each of these and was able to suggest many reasons as to why she was not managing to complete the required work, or understand.

      It was, in part, connected to the intensity and density of the content, delivered in an as yet unfamiliar language:

       • if I listen the English a long time maybe I have some headache, yeah. So maybe in one hour of class I just listen half an hour.

      It was also a lack of subject specific vocabulary:

       • The most difficult I think is the academic word, yeah, because in some about science project maybe have some more academic word, yeah, you need know and you don’t understand … academic biology word.

      Yet also connected to perceived differences in levels of knowledge, and assumptions made around the knowledge she had:

       • I think my classmates have knowledge much more than me … I think because they are UK student, you know. They, maybe they know how to study in UK but I don’t know and maybe their knowledge is, some knowledge that we learn is different. It’s some may be a little different, yeah, and maybe the, and the teacher know what they learned before but the teacher don’t know I learned before.

      Here, Mai also touches on the differences in educational approaches to study, and what knowledge is privileged, and this leads to suggestions that confidence is also an issue. Here Mai initially suggests that confidence is an issue for all international students, but quite quickly moves towards it being a personal difficulty:

       • the international student don’t have confidence to join the class, to join the, to join to talk with our UK classmate. BB: Why do you think that is?Maybe just my problem because I am very shy in the class so I have some question maybe I just ask the classmate who nearby, yeah, to me. So, and use a very low voice to ask, yeah, because I think maybe they all know this answer but I don’t know, yeah. Yeah, it’s just about confidence.

      However, behind all of these self-identified barriers to being able to participate in and gain access to the learning community she is part of, there is also a resistance to doing so. This seems to be particularly true around developing an understanding of the specialist English that she needs in order to do this. Mai reports this as ‘not caring’, but it also seems to be a (semi) conscious resistance to the use of a different language to communicate with peers when Chinese is viewed as the dominant and common language for those she will remain in contact with. Therefore, when discussing English as being the accepted language for scientific communication, Mai’s response was:

       • Maybe in the, maybe in China they give the Chinese name and after the Chinese name give the English name, but most of Chinese student… BB: Don’t listen? …they, yeah. We are missing the English name. Who care? I think, because they all use Chinese. They don’t know the English name.

      Despite having been given the opportunity to learn this key, core technical English vocabulary prior to beginning her TPG studies, Mai had resisted learning it and continued to use only the Chinese. Mai also reported choosing to discuss her studies in the United Kingdom only with other Chinese students, including a friend who was studying in China, rather than those from other countries on her programme. As there was only one other Chinese student taking the same programme, this limited her choices considerably:

       • my classmate from China so sometimes maybe we can together, sometimes because some option class is different, maybe do it myself. BB: And what about all the other students? Why does it need to be the one from China? Because we can discuss more fast yeah. If I don’t know how to say it use English I can use other word, you know. And if with other UK student, sometimes we make maybe, the speed is so fast.

      In fact, Mai expressed as much concern over not knowing the Chinese term for something as she did over her lack of English vocabulary:

       • sometimes if you use English you can’t remember the Chinese name.

      Her concern over maintaining her identity as a speaker of Chinese meant that she maintained a focus on translation as a means of understanding the knowledge that was communicated to her in English. Thus, when reading, she continued to translate all unknown vocabulary into Chinese, keeping a notebook that was simply a list of words with their translation:

       • when you reading the word you need record it and know the translation.

      This meant that in class, she tended to not pay attention and to simply wait until it was finished to translate or ask her friends to explain, ultimately leading her to suggest that she stopped listening and, again, ‘didn’t care’:

       • It’s difficult. I need time to understand so I don’t make mistakes. I will do after class. I remember last class like this, it takes a lot of time. I will ask my friends and they explain.

       • maybe sometimes I can’t understand the words. Okay, I am still thinking what they mean about the word. And what the teacher said later, I don’t know. I maybe not care.

      This resistance to full engagement with developing the language needed to communicate effectively in English in her discipline could be seen as an agential choice, a desire to maintain a previously held identity and a push against a powerful hegemonic force. It could also be seen as a way of protecting herself, by saying she didn’t care she was able to save face when she didn’t meet the requirements of her assessments. Either way, Mai presented a challenge to this School. It was clear that the majority of participants from the School had thought very little about the impact and use of language in communication of disciplinary knowledge. One of the teachers I observed, for example, argued that language in his context was not an issue at all; there are just a few key words and that from these enough could be understood. Yet during my observations I wrote down lists of conceptual vocabulary and language used in a subject specific context that would be likely to form a barrier for an EAL speaker who had previously studied English for general (academic) purposes. During the practical classes, there was a great deal of general conversation, both around social activities and the academic work being undertaken. The two were frequently interwoven, making it difficult to separate where one ends and the other begins. For a student struggling with both the new content of the subject and the language of study, the obvious approach to this ‘noise’ would be to ignore it, to block it out and to decide you ‘didn’t care’. I observed Mai do this and by doing this much of the expected or presumed learning was lost, as was much of the affirming and confidence building that is important for avoiding a sense of isolation when struggling with information.

      Although

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