Chinese postgraduate students negotiating their academic writing and identities in an Anglophone context: A dialogic, decolonising case study

• Blends dialogic and decolonising theories in a narrative case study. • Investigates Chinese students’ study abroad beyond deficits and colonial binaries. • Explores students' agency and creativity in negotiating Western academic norms. • Unpacks complexity of students’ emerging transcultural scholarly identity. • Highlights role of dialogic engagement in intercultural study abroad programs. The number of Chinese international students studying in Anglophone countries is returning to pre-pandemic levels, intensifying competition to attract and retain these students. Previously, many studies have investigated this phenomenon, but students and institutions continue to report significant challenges in the students' negotiation of linguistic, cultural, academic and identity issues. In part, this may be because dominant narratives in such studies have relied upon deficit characterisations of Chinese students that blame challenges on the students, or colonial narratives that position Western academic knowledge and practices as superior, or other colonially-based assumptions. This qualitative narrative case study resists these narratives, and instead adopts dialogic and decolonising theories to develop nuanced critical accounts of three postgraduate Chinese students studying and researching in Australia. The study shows the complex ways in which the students dialogically engage with multiple languages, texts and people, developing hybrid academic texts and scholarly identities along the way.