Autonomous Chinese-speaking sojourners exhibit their autonomy through seeking out affordances offered by their social networks for diverse linguistic and non-linguistic encounters within various social settings. This research investigates how a group of autonomous Chinese-speaking sojourners at a UK university exercise their agency to deal with not only linguistic but also interactional, emotional, contextual and identity issues thus better responding to affordances offered by different complex and changing eco-systems in line with their language learning and other personal goals.
This multiple case study employs ethnographic methods to track how autonomous Chinese-speaking sojourners at a UK university seek out the affordances offered by their non-Chinese speaking social networks to achieve their language learning and other personal goals. It adopts an ecological perspective (e.g. Palfreyman 2014) to investigate the construct of language learner autonomy and how it is mediated in different social eco-systems.Chinese-speaking sojourners are currently the largest proportion of international students across UK universities (HESA 2020), however, it is reported most of these sojourners have a low level of social integration into the local and international communities in the UK (e.g. Wu 2014, Gu & Schweisfurt 2017, Page 2019), which has given rise to the notion of 'Chinese phantom' (Urban Dictionary 2020).Nonetheless, there is a lack of research investigating any successful Chinese-speaking sojourners who exhibit their autonomy through standing out of their co-nationals and participating in local and international social networks during their study abroad to have linguistic and non-linguistic encounters to achieve their language learning and other personal goals.To bridge this gap, data is gathered through fifteen semi-structured narrative interviews, eight participant observations followed by eight observation interviews in four different social settings with six main participants.The findings predominantly identify a set of newly-discovered strategies employed by these six main participants which are not recorded in the existing taxonomies of Language Learning Strategies proposed by Oxford (2013). The findings show that these autonomous sojourners not only employ a set of strategies to deal with language issues but also socio-cultural contexts and identity issues in different social settings in the UK. For example, the results show that one of the autonomous sojourners exercises his agency to self-initially employ a newly-observed 'Concealing Identity Strategy' to hide his self-perceived atheist identity thus obtaining access into a religious setting which he considers otherwise inaccessible for his language learning.Therefore, this multiple-case study gives insight into the role of learner autonomy amongst a group of international students and how it can be socially mediated in a complex transnational world based on the ecological perspective.
