Introduction

Students from China enrolled in Australian higher education exceeded 130 000 as of March 2019，with the majority concentrated in the following four broad fields of education:①management and commerce;②engineering and related technologies;③information technology;and④society and culture，according to the latest data released by the Department of Education and Training of Australia.^[1]Because many science and commerce students are taking the humanities as elective subjects as people expect to pursue several careers over the course of their working lives and the long-term value of studying the humanities has become increasingly significant(Turner and Brass，2014:90)，the implications of Australian humanities courses for Chinese international students is worth more scholarly attention.Existing scholarship on the study experience of Chinese international students in Australia has focused mainly on subjects such as accounting，online learning or nursing(Smith et al.，2018;Bhattacharyya，2008;Chen，Bennett，and Maton，2008;Wang and Greenwood，2015)，or their experience and production of locality through social media(Martin and Rizvi，2014;Gao，2016;Ma，2017;Sonnenschein et al.，2018)and educational and career expectations(Blackmore，2017;Cao and Tran，2015a).There has been little research into the impact of humanities subjects on Chinese students’critical thinking，although Lu and Singh had launched a call for research in this area(2017:2).This article seeks to fill in the gap by focusing on the academic performance of two groups of Chinese international students who took Chinese Cinema and Asian Cinema and Media(hereafter Asian Cinema)at a top-ranking Australian university in the second semester of 2018 and the first semester of 2019 respectively.By analysing the academic papers and results of these two groups，we will answer four broad questions—what difficulties do Chinese international students encounter，what strengths do they have，what kind of progress will they make，and what challenges do they face in the study of these two subjects?A better understanding of Chinese international students’experience of studying in the humanities field，and the impact of these subjects on them，will not only assist educators to reflect on curriculum design and pedagogy but also help policymakers to better interpret the needs of Australia’s biggest source of international students.

Specifically，we adopt a qualitative research approach and select two sets of samples from two humanities subjects offered at the University of Melbourne with a quasi-experimental design.The SAGE Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods specifies different kinds of quasi-experimental designs that are deemed useful for different research conditions，and the one relevant to this study is the“nonequivalent control group design”as we will explain in more detail in the Research Design section(Shadish and Clark，2011:899).The first sample set is our control group，involving 20 students from 127 enrolments in Chinese Cinema.The second is our experimental group，consisting of 12 students from 110 enrolments in Asian Cinema.Adopting a qualitative research approach，we carried out the following tasks.First，we analysed the mid-term test results for our control group，and argue that Chinese international students tend to lack the ability to critically engage with English scholarship and are unfamiliar with the ways arguments are developed in academic articles.Second，by focusing on the film reviews and presentations of the control group，we found that Chinese international students’critical understanding of course content is notably improved if they can rely on their first language and feel a cultural or emotional connection with what they learn.Third，we studied the end-ofsemester essays of the control group and discovered that most students had significantly improved their critical thinking and analytical skills after an Australian-style training，which places strong emphasis on the value of critical thinking(Lloyd and Bahr，2010:1).Fourth，we examined the mid-term and final essays of the experimental group and found that English continues to be a major challenge for their humanities study.Based on our research into these two groups，we argue that Chinese international students benefit well from an Australian-style training system in the humanities，and that they demonstrate great potential in their critical thinking ability，which we define，for the purpose of this study，as the ability to critically interpret media texts and to critique social or cultural norms^[2].But this critical thinking ability and the ability to communicate their ideas are noticeably hampered by their English levels.