Examining Saudi International Students’ Linguistic, Cultural, and Identity Experience in Canada: A Narrative Research Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The international student experience presents an interesting and complex case in which a student must adjust to a new environment. Informed by poststructural theories, this exploratory study aimed to gain an in-depth understanding of eight Saudi international students’ linguistic, cultural, and identity experiences while living in Canada. It examined how Saudi students’ linguistic and cultural transitions within Canada relate to their L2 learning. To conduct this study, narrative inquiry was adopted as a methodology to gather narratives from Saudi participants by conducting semi-structured interviews. In the first part of the findings, using thematic analysis, I found nine emergent themes that revealed participants’ cultural/linguistic challenges, e.g., language anxiety and problems with academic English, and demonstrated participants’ difficulties socializing in their new L2 communities. In the second part of the findings, a narrative co-construction of one Saudi female participant’s life story in Canada revealed that gender-related issues were a central theme in Saudi female students’ integration. Linking all these emergent themes to poststructural L2 acquisition (SLA) theory, four key conclusions about the Saudi international student experience were brought to light: 1) Saudi participants faced challenges in building an academic identity in which they could participate confidently; 2) the formation of a non-native speaker identity impacted their ability to fully participate in the L2 community; 3) while attempting to gain access to the L2 community, some participants found themselves constrained and secluded by what they perceived as a lack of communicative competence; and 4) female participants talked about the re-negotiation of the Saudi female identity throughout their stay in Canada. Given these conclusions, this study carries various policy implications through which university administrators can build support services and foster international student inclusion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".