A significant proportion of Chinese university teachers without PhD degrees choose to pursue their studies abroad in countries such as Malaysia, South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, driven by various motivations. These individuals, whom I refer to as ‘Chinese international teacher-students’, often have to navigate the tension between maintaining their established professional image and adapting to the academic demands and cultural contexts of their host countries. Their established roles as university teachers in China distinguish them from traditional PhD students, who typically lack such professional affiliations, thereby contributing to the uniqueness of this study. Despite the growing body of research on doctoral writing by multilingual scholars (Wang & Parr, 2021; Wisker, 2016; Carter & Kumar, 2017), to my knowledge, no study has specifically explored how this group negotiates their academic identities through everyday English writing from their own perspectives as multilingual writers.

This qualitative case study seeks to examine participants’ attitudes and perceptions towards writing in English as PhD students, as well as the lived experiences of international teacher-students as they navigate different linguistic and cultural norms. The study aims to explore how they perceive, interpret, and construct their evolving academic identities. The selected countries—primary destinations for Chinese university teachers pursuing PhDs—offer distinct linguistic and academic environments, making them ideal for comparative analysis. The participants, ten university teachers from China enrolled in doctoral programs, were selected to investigate how their established professional identities interact with the demands of PhD study.

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and reflective diaries, ensuring comprehensive coverage of key topics while allowing for in-depth exploration of participants’ lived experiences. Additionally, pie-chart drawing, a visual method supplementing the interviews, was employed to examine how individuals negotiate their academic identities while engaging in English-medium doctoral writing across diverse cultural and linguistic contexts. This creative method enables a deeper exploration of identity perception, including aspects that may go unnoticed or remain subconscious, thereby ‘making the invisible visible’ (Samatar et al., 2021, p. 4). Rich qualitative data from interviews and reflective diaries were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun, V. et al. 2023) and Gee’s (2000) theory of identity. Findings indicate that the academic writing experiences of these teacher-students are shaped by their unique professional positioning, their reflections on past academic and professional backgrounds, and their engagement with new scholarly communities. Key influencing factors include supervision experiences, feedback reception, emotional responses, writing progress, self-perception, and broader academic contexts. In this paper, I illustrate these factors as identified by participants and integrate Gee’s theoretical framework to examine how these elements interact with their academic identity development. By exploring their doctoral writing experiences, this study highlights the nuanced ways in which international doctoral teacher-students navigate their academic journeys, ultimately shaping their academic identities.

This study underscores that academic identity is not static but continually shaped by engagement with various linguistic norms, prior academic and professional experiences, and the demands of new academic contexts. Moreover, it contributes to the empirical and theoretical knowledge base on doctoral writing and academic identity formation. Furthermore, the study offers valuable insights into the lived experiences of academics in similar contexts, providing recommendations for host and home universities to better support and facilitate the professional and personal development of international teacher-students.

References: Braun, V. et al. (2023) ‘Doing Reflexive Thematic Analysis’, in Supporting Research in Counselling and Psychotherapy. [Online]. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 19–38. Carter, S. & Kumar, V. (2017) ‘Ignoring me is part of learning’: Supervisory feedback on doctoral writing. Innovations in education and teaching international. [Online] 54 (1), 68–75. Gee, J. P. (2000) Identity as an analytic lens for research in education. Review of research in education. [Online] 2599–125. Samatar, A. et al. (2021) No love found: how female students of colour negotiate and repurpose university spaces. British journal of sociology of education. [Online] 42 (5–6), 717–732. Wang, M. & Parr, G. (2021) A Chinese doctoral student’s experience of L2 English academic writing in Australia: Negotiating practices and identities. Journal of English for academic purposes. [Online] 49100944–. Wisker, G. (2016) ‘Agency and Articulation in Doctoral Writing: Building the Messy Research Journey into a Well-Constructed Thesis’, in Research Literacies and Writing Pedagogies for Masters and Doctoral Writers. [Online]. pp. 184–201.