‘But when you are doing your exams it is the same as in China’ – Chinese students adjusting to western approaches to teaching and learning

Investigations of Chinese students and their approaches to learning have emphasised a dichotomy in ‘western’ and ‘Confucian’ approaches to education but in a longitudinal study of Chinese postgraduate students’ academic adjustment to a British university the dichotomy is less than real. The focus of this research was on an in-depth study of students’ own conceptualisation of their learning and the vocabulary they used to describe their adjustment. Ethnographic interview data were collected from 14 participants studying different disciplines at three points during their first 10 months of study in a British university. The data show how students brought certain concepts of learning with them, acquired new ones, and found ways of combining the two. Students are aware of the contextual nature of their new learning processes, and the relationship between the two sets of ideas is not one of substitution but rather of extension and interaction. The implications for teaching and learning are discussed.