AN ‘IMAGINED COMMUNITY’: RE-IMAGINING STUDENTS’ EXPECTATIONS OF ACADEMIC STUDY
INTRODUCTION
Studying abroad has been described as an identity-transforming experience, but one that often occurs within the ‘transnational bubble’ of the international university (Gu and Schweisfurth, 2015). Using the results of a small research project with Chinese pre-sessional students at the University of Reading, this paper explores two ways in which students on pre-sessional courses, which may seem to operate as a protected bubble within a (university) bubble, are in fact strongly influenced by their aspirations beyond it. Our 2018 project focused on the students’ expectations of their future academic study, specifically any challenges they anticipated and their sense of preparedness for dealing with these. With a limited number of responses, our conclusions remain cautiously limited as
well. However, this research served the purpose of foregrounding the views of individual students in their own voice, and the following discussion deliberately provides individual quotes where possible. Equally importantly, the project productively illuminated a pre-existing area of research into the lives of students beyond the classroom context and can thus serve as a useful way to pose questions about our EAP students’ identity and motivation. In the following discussion, I draw on the concept of ‘imagined communities’ elaborated by Pavlenko and Norton (2007), who argue that the imagination of future networks and situations can impact learners as much as their immediate environment. The power of imagination (Kanno and Norton, 2003) may thus be essential for our learners.
