Written by Faiqah Faiqah and Nashid Nigar (University of Melbourne)
Australia’s higher education sector earns more than $30 billion annually from international students. Yet for many, the promise of a “world-class” degree is undercut by daily struggles with unspoken academic norms, linguistic regulation, and the affective labour of belonging. These challenges are not evenly distributed — students from less-researched cohorts, such as Indonesian postgraduates, encounter both the familiar hurdles of academic English and more subtle forms of institutional marginalisation.
Rather than adopting a deficit narrative, our research foregrounds the critical, creative, relational, and multilingual strategies these students use to navigate Australian academia. At the same time, their accounts reveal how affective linguistic discrimination and epistemic injustice persist within ostensibly inclusive universities.
Vino’s experience illustrates how even small corrections can carry heavy weight: “My lecturer wrote that ‘explain’ is not for a table—it should be ‘shows’, and there were many more comments like that”. What might seem like stylistic advice triggered deep uncertainty about his academic legitimacy. For Daisy, whose undergraduate work was entirely in Indonesian, the shift was exhausting: “I just try to pass”. These moments show how tacit norms — around tone, argumentation, and vocabulary — operate as invisible barriers, privileging those already socialised into Anglophone academic discourse.
The burden was not limited to writing. Students described managing their classroom participation through what Zembylas terms “affective governance” — the internalisation of institutional expectations. Vino explained, “Sometimes I avoid participating in class because I’m not sure if my grammar or pronunciation is correct. I don’t want to be judged as incompetent”. Daisy moderated her ambitions to preserve emotional energy: “I maintained a sufficient level of effort without striving for top grades”. Such strategies are not disengagement but forms of emotional self-preservation in environments where confidence is often equated with competence.
Cultural dissonance compounded these pressures. Iqbal found the informality of addressing lecturers by first name unsettling: “People don’t need to say Mister or Miss, even if they’re older or lecturers, and that feels uncomfortable for me”. While promoted as egalitarian, such norms can inadvertently exclude those from cultures where formal address signals respect and facilitates academic relationships.
Despite these challenges, the students practised and produced agency through what Nigar & Kostogriz call hybrid professional becoming — strategically entangling institutional expectations with their own linguistic, cultural, and religious identities. Peer networks, particularly with other Indonesians, created “epistemic safe spaces” for sharing strategies and translating academic expectations. Daisy built a close friendship with a Burmese classmate through shared Muslim values, showing how belonging was constructed as much through faith and lifestyle as through language. Nigar and Colleagues describe this form of solidarity as “proliferated by agentive practices” — an affect that propels relationally-constituted professionalism, where intercultural connections are sustained not only through shared cultural markers but through ongoing acts of care, hybridity and recognition.
In multicultural group work, Miska adapted her speech patterns for her Chinese classmates: “I try to mimic the way they talk and use language that’s easy for them to understand”. This is intercultural labour — work that challenges the idea of communication as a neutral skill and instead recognises it as relational and productive.
Students also mobilised digital tools such as Grammarly, translation apps, and ChatGPT. Miska noted these helped her “fix things more confidently”, while Vino used them to track his improvement. Yet these tools also risked homogenising voice, underscoring the need for critical AI literacy so they empower rather than regulate expression.
These findings have global resonance. Across Canada, the UK, and the US, international students encounter the same paradox: they are courted for their economic and cultural value yet often required to adapt unilaterally to dominant norms. In Australia, recent migration policy changes threaten to heighten gatekeeping through stricter language requirements — measures that risk reinforcing native-speakerist hierarchies while ignoring the multilingual repertoires students bring.
If equity is to move beyond rhetoric, institutions and policymakers must act.
- For educators: Unpack tacit expectations, co-construct feedback that preserves student voice, and embed translanguaging into learning activities.
- For institutions: Co-design assessment rubrics with students, offer annotated exemplars, and legitimise multimodal literacies in assessment.
- For policy: Move beyond IELTS as the sole readiness metric, fund intercultural mentorship, and recognise that language learning is inseparable from social and emotional integration.
As Faria powerfully puts it: “I don’t stay quiet because I have nothing to say. I stay quiet because I need strength to say it in my way”. This sentiment captures the core argument: Indonesian postgraduates are not merely adapting to survive; they are re-authoring what it means to belong in Australian higher education. Their translanguaging, digital practices, and faith-based solidarities are not peripheral adjustments, but central practices of justice-oriented becoming.
For universities willing to listen — to silences as much as speech, to multilingual expression as much as “standard” forms — these students are already showing the way toward a more just and inclusive academic future.
*This post is based on our research at Group Eight University in Australia entitled: A Fresh Look at English Language Challenges for Indonesian Postgraduate Students in Australian Higher Education.
Author bio:
Faiqah Faiqah teaches at EF (Education First) in Jakarta, specialising in EFL pedagogy and academic English. She holds a Master’s in TESOL from Monash University, where she earned a High Distinction for her education research project. Her scholarly interests include language learning, written corrective feedback, and justice-oriented approaches in education.
Nashid Nigar teaches at the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Education, specialising in English language, literacy, academic writing, and teacher education. Her Monash University PhD on language teacher professional identity was graded Exceptional and received the prestigious Mollie Holman Award. She researches language and literacy teaching, learning, and educational research.