A Failure of Communication on the Cross-Cultural Campus

Abstract

This article reports findings from an ethnographic study into the adjustment experience of a group of postgraduate international students at a university in the South of England. Friendship emerged as a major theme in this study; of particular importance to students was the desire and failure to achieve contact with host nationals. An absence of host contact was a source of deep disillusionment for students who understood the positive impact of host friends on linguistic and cultural knowledge. A lack of host contact was attributed by students to indifference on the part of the host community, and in the extreme to racial and Islamophobic prejudice. Such suspicion was provoked by students’ encounter with verbal and physical abuse, which also served to entrench the move to form monoethnic friendship groups. Research into the host perspective of international education is called for to inform the internationalization strategies adopted by HEI.