This qualitative study aims to understand the areas of international students' critical thinking-related initial difficulties, in order to facilitate their academic experiences in UK universities. Using a sample of 14 British teachers, the findings reveal that students from culturally and linguistically diverse traditions are very different in approaching critical thinking tasks, which seems to affect their academic performance adversely. It is recommended that explicit efforts should be made to raise awareness of the need to enable overseas students to acclimatise to the new academic environment.