Global Englishes in UK Higher Education: Communication Experiences of Postgraduate Students from Asia

Abstract

UK higher education has become increasingly multilingual, with English used through diverse accents, repertoires, and interactional norms. Although UK universities are not EMI contexts in the same policy sense as English-medium programmes in non-English-dominant systems, English still mediates teaching, assessment, supervision, group work, feedback, and everyday academic participation. This study examined the orientations of postgraduate students’ orientations toward Global Englishes and explored how these orientations related to perceived communication challenges, adaptation strategies, institutional support, and participation in internationalised UK university settings. The study used a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, combining an online survey with interviews and focus groups. Participants strongly endorsed the legitimacy of diverse Englishes and prioritised intelligibility over native-like norms. At the same time, they reported recurring difficulties with accent comprehension, idioms, humour, culturally embedded references, seminar turn-taking, indirect feedback, and discipline-specific terminology. Qualitative accounts showed that students managed these difficulties through clarification requests, paraphrasing, advance preparation, peer support, recap practices, and written channels. The findings indicate that Global Englishes-friendly orientations helped students negotiate meaning but did not remove the local academic and institutional demands of postgraduate participation. The study contributes empirical evidence on how postgraduate students from Asia negotiate English diversity in UK higher education. It shows that communication support needs to address both student strategies and the institutional conditions that make participation more transparent.