Investigating Thai students' academic literacy development in Australian universities

Different social settings create different goals and demands for learning, and writing goals and the required degree of sophistication in writing can change when students move across different disciplines. Especially for Thai students who further their education abroad, the challenge they face is not writing in isolation. The relocation to a new learning context means that they encounter a number of variables, for example, culture, educational level, and potentially different disciplines, which may bring difficulties and influence their academic literacy development. Taking a case study approach, this study examines the writing development of Thai students in Australian universities. The participants in this study are Thai students undertaking postgraduate education in Australian universities. The data includes students’ writing, reading texts, classroom observation and interviews with students to examine the writing demands and students’ writing development. The data are analysed using tools from Systemic Functional Linguistics, including work on genre analysis (e.g. Martin and Rose, 2008) and curriculum macro-genres (e.g. Christie, 1997). The research is in progress, and this paper will discuss the research design and methodological issues.