International Students Tackling Linguistic Challenges in Cross-Border English-medium Instruction: The Perspective of Migration Infrastructures

Drawing on Xiang and Lindquist’s notion of migration infrastructure, this study investigates how international students utilize contextual resources to enhance learning in English-medium instruction (EMI) degree programs in the Japanese context. We recruited 13 Chinese students enrolled in EMI postgraduate degree programs at four Japanese universities and collected data from semi-structured interviews and the participants’ reading/lecture notes. Qualitative content analysis revealed that despite the constraints of regulatory infrastructure (monolingual orientation at the institutional level), Chinese students utilized various resources offered by technological, social, and commercial infrastructures to facilitate their academic communication and foster their academic learning. The findings revealed that despite facing linguistic difficulties in their EMI program, the students used technological, social, and commercial infrastructural resources to access knowledge, developed multilingual habitus both in and outside their classrooms, and ultimately enhanced the quality of their cross-border education. This study provides migration infrastructure as a useful framework to examine international students’ challenges and adjustments in their cross-border education. In doing so, this study extends our understanding of international students’ experiences by going beyond a linguistic-centered perspective to encompass their language use as embodied socio-material processes. This paper concludes with implications for the implementation of English-medium higher education.