More than just grammar: A collaborative project assessing, addressing and tracking the transition needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students at UTAS

Domestic CALD (Culturally and Linguistically Diverse) students straddle "Internationalisation" and Bradley related reforms and face significant challenges in their transition to higher education. This 2 year study at UTAS, incorporating student interviews and testing and tracking the results of CALD students, while supporting the necessity for pre-entry language testing for this group and suggesting a level of language proficiency that can be determined pre-entry and below which students are set up to fail, also contests the reduction of these challenges to "language" issues. It reveals a more complex process of transition that faces the CALD cohort in their adaption to a new cultural, social and linguistic environment. This is important as the narrow notion of a language proficiency deficit suggests something that can be discretely tested for and supported outside the classroom. The more complex process of cultural adjustment revealed in this study clearly requires a broader institutional response, incorporating curricular and co-curricular elements. A number of these cultural elements have an influence on the acquisition of academic literacies that form a significant, though often hidden, part of the curriculum. From this understanding, recommendations will be made in relation to approaches to supporting the successful transition of this cohort and the paper will argue that project findings have implications for the effective and sustainable support of both International and "participation" (Bradley and related reforms) cohorts.