Wellbeing Literacy is defined as the capability to communicate wellbeing with relevant vocabulary, knowledge and skills to intentionally support oneself and others’ wellbeing. To understand what wellbeing literacy means for different populations, it is important to understand the role that wellbeing literacy in lay people’s wellbeing. Phenomenography focuses on the perception of individuals’ subjective realities and their experiences, and aims to describe, analyse and understand individual’s experiences with and understandings of various aspects of their worlds. As a research method, phenomenography has two main characteristics – explorative data collection and contextual analytic data analysis, with specific data analysis procedures. By following the seven steps of data coding, a deeper, personal understanding of lay people’s wellbeing literacy can be developed, and a comprehensive picture of lay people’s wellbeing could be gained. This presentation illustrates how phenomenography can be used to investigate the wellbeing experiences of Chinese international students studying in the Australian context.