The internationalisation of higher education worldwide has seen a dramatic increase in the number of international students, especially the case with postgraduate taught students. In the academic year 2015-2016, the number of full-time postgraduate international students in the UK Higher Education (HE) has increased up to 174,170, accounting for 58% of total postgraduate student population (HESA, 2017). Encountering culturally and linguistically different site of classroom, many international students experience potential inequities and barriers to negotiate their new student identities, which is also closely related to their classroom participation and engagement (Ryu, & Lombardi, 2015). Therefore, exploring how this group of students negotiate and develop the sense of themselves is crucial to facilitate their studies in the new learning environment and can have significant practical and policy implications for UK Higher Education and other international institutions that might have similar diverse population of international students. However, there is a lack of contemporary research addressing the examined issue (Duff, 2010; Yeh, 2014).

This paper, drawing on part of the empirical data from my PhD project, examines selected cases of international students’ ongoing learning experiences in the intercultural classroom at a British university in their efforts to integrate into the new learning environment. The analysis of these selected ethnographic case studies provide insights into postgraduates’ construction of new identities and negotiation of legitimate participation in the new site of intercultural classrooms in the UK HE through answering three research questions:

1. How do these international students feel about their position in the classroom?
2. How do their evolving identities interplay with their classroom participation?
3. Comparing different classroom communities, how do their peers and instructors influence their socialisation into the new learning context?

Grounded in the theoretical framework of “Community of Practice” (CoP) (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998), this paper perceives international students’ learning as a socially situated process in which they interact with more experienced members to more towards full participation as legitimate members (Duff, 2010). Instead of regarding as international students’ responsibility to adjust or to change, this study investigates how community members interact and adjust to each other to create an equal classroom atmosphere. Although originating from non-school learning, CoP has been widely used as a generative theoretical framework in second language classroom settings (Haneda, 2006). Within this framework, Lave and Wenger apply the concept of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) to illustrate how newcomers move toward full participation as legitimate members through acquiring the skills and knowledge essential for a certain CoP (Morita, 2004). Meanwhile, Lave and Wenger define identities as “long-term, living relations between persons and their place and participation in communities of practice” (1991: 53). A synthesis of the claims provides foundation to analyse how international students as newcomers construct identities as they change in how they participate in classrooms.

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