Anja is a Senior Research Fellow in Education at Southampton and her keynote address focused on the Student Diversity and Academic Writing project with which she has been involved at Lancaster University and LSE.
I found Anja’s talk particularly timely, as the SCONUL task group I have been involved with has just submitted the draft guidelines on library support for international students. Anja made the following points based on her research, which focused on Indian, Greek and Chinese taught postgrads in buiness and marketing:
* Indian students are often taught using specific course books and notes so they have no need to reference. They rarely do coursework
* Indian students often miss out on presessional courses because their English is good, so they miss out on a lot of information they really need
* Indian teachers are not often involved in research so their students have no concept of it, or of scholarly journals.
* Greek students are used to having private tuition to help them pass exams, which they can retake as often as they need to.
* Greek students are used to relying heavily on peer support rather than support from acadmic staff.
* Greek students are provided with key texts free, so don’t use libraries.
Greek students are used to memorising and reproducing, which has implications for plagiarism
* Chinese students – we need to differentiaite between undergraduate chinese students (who may have come to the UK because they failed the national entrance exams for chinese universities) and postgrads who are already succesful academically.
* Chinese libraries vary greatly in size and quality. UK libraries need to make clear to students what the library is for and what they can do there.

Mandurah bird again