CULTURAL AND SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT

  See "Stages of Cultural Adjustment."

Tips for Tutoring:
· Ask students to rephrase what you have said, or ask follow-up questions
· Repeat key information.
· Do not take all hostile comments personally, student may have "culture shock."
· Refer student to I-Place.

A student from Oman:  "Some professors assume that international students know about what I call 'typical American issues,' which take time for international students to follow. These include politics and societal issues such as TV shows and current events."

A first-year Taiwanese student:  "I lack knowledge background in my field, so there are too many technical terms I just cannot understand."

Tips for Tutoring:
· Ask student to explain background that seems unclear.
· Discuss culturally-specific issues with student.
· Review course reading with student.
· Suggest magazines or books that would help student acquire cultural or field-specific background.

A first-year Korean student:  "I think listening is more difficult than the other skills because if we can understand what Americans are saying easily, rapidly and perfectly, our adjusting effort to the American way of life, especially academic life, will be easier."

Tips for Tutoring:
· Allow for silence.  Students need time to process what you have said.
· Repeat key points or ask students to write them down.
· Teach students how to ask for clarification or repetition.

Many international students are inhibited about speaking because they are painfully aware of their problems in some or all of these areas:
 
    fluency    intonation
    pronunciation  word and phrase stress

They fear not being understood, not being able to respond rapidly or correctly, and not being able to say what they mean, as the following students testify:

A first-year student from Hong Kong:  "Active participation in the classroom is really a problem for me. Even if I can understand the question, I cannot respond quickly to it or do not have the courage to talk in class. In most cases I feel disappointed. "

A first-year Taiwanese student:  "When asked to speak, international students think in their own languages and then try to translate into English. It is the most difficult thing for international students to react immediately in English.  They need some time, but sometimes they don't get it.  These situations might make the students upset."

An Indonesian student: "Although I've been here for three years, I sometimes still have difficulties expressing my opinion in class, and this makes me afraid to speak up.  I sometimes find that what I am saying is different from what I am thinking. I lose control of the talk."

Tips for Tutoring:
· When student reads aloud, do not correct every error.  Listen for a pattern and offer tips for improvement.
· Record yourself reading sentences or paragraphs in which students have patterns of pronunciation error.
· Do not immediately fill silences.  The student may be translating what she wants to say.
· Discuss strategies for interrupting or entering ongoing discussions.  Give students cues to try in class (i.e., raised hand, loud intake of breath, phrases).

The following factors may impede international students’ reading comprehension:  slow reading speed, difficulty with new vocabulary, and problems understanding culturally different concepts or word connotations.

Tips for Tutoring:
· Recognize that the student’s paper may be weak because he did not understand the reading.  You may have to review the reading assignment with the student.
· Teach active reading skills.  Suggest that the student skim reading assignments and generate questions before reading in-depth.  She should also summarize the reading after each paragraph or two and after she has read the entire selection.  She can write these summaries in the margins.

Students often have difficulty in these areas because they are translating from their native languages into English.  Furthermore, usage rules are often difficult to memorize, and dictionaries do not always list current discipline-specific terminology.

Tips for Tutoring:
· Refer the student to the following sources:   The Longman Language Activator (Longman), thesauri, idiom dictionaries, dictionaries of field-specific terms.
· Encourage students to keep cards or lists of new words or idioms they encounter.  They should review whenever they can.
· Ask students to rephrase sentences with idiom or usage errors.  If they cannot, give alternative words or expressions, and let them choose the one closest to their meaning.  They can also write down the list of alternatives.

Non-native speakers of English often have difficulty with the following:
 

Tips for Tutoring:
· Refer the student to the following sources:  Betty Azar’s Understanding and Using English Grammar (Prentice Hall), and Diana Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference (St. Martin’s Press).
· Move from less directive to more directive strategies (if necessary).  First, just say:  "There are some agreement errors here, can you find them?"  If the student cannot, point to specific sentences with the errors, then to the errors themselves.  If the student cannot correct the error, identify it (i.e., "Does the verb agree with the subject?" "Do you need an article here?").
· Keep your talking to a minimum to encourage the student to become an independent editor of his own work.  Sometimes you will simply have to give the correct form, or you may need to explain a rule or look it up with the student.
· Remember that students cannot take in too much new information at once.  Try to identify a pattern of error.  Find out if the student knows the rules to correct recurrent errors.  If she does not, explain or look the rule up, correct one or two errors together, and let the student identify other instances of the error.  Give a number count if necessary (i.e., "I see three more errors of that type in this paragraph.  Can you find them?").
· Encourage students to read their corrected sentences aloud.  If you do grammar exercises with student, focus on oral exercises.  In order to acquire good English and to avoid making mistakes in the first place, students need to hear themselves speaking correctly.  If students only learn and apply rules, they tend to repeat their mistakes.  Encourage students to read accurate sentences aloud in a dramatic or exaggerated way or to read a passage emphasizing a corrected error patterns (i.e., plural endings, correct agreement, etc.).
· For a paper with many miscellaneous errors, you might have the student bring a blank tape to a session.  You can slowly read the text and punctuation onto the tape, correcting it.  Try this for 1/2 to 1 page (you may need to stop the recorder to read ahead and think before recording).  Make minimal changes to the student’s English - just enough for accuracy.  The student can go home and replay the tape as many times as needed to make the corrections.  Some students adore this method and make dramatic progress; others despise it and quit (it’s tedious).

Benjamin Bloom, whose taxonomy of thinking skills has been widely taught in education courses, arranges these skills in hierarchical order with the later ones incorporating the former:

Knowledge:  The ability to recognize and remember particular ideas
Comprehension:   The ability to restate, interpret, and make judgments based on particular materials or ideas
Application:    The ability to apply a previously learned idea to a situation in which no  instruction or model is provided
Analysis:   The ability to break down material into its parts, determine the  relationship of those parts, and recognize the overall organizational  pattern of the material
Synthesis:   The ability to combine old and new ideas in order to create original  ideas with clear structure
Evaluation:   The ability to apply principles and standards of order to make a  judgment about the value of an idea or set of ideas

As international students address more challenging thinking tasks, you may see their English language ability break down in both speaking and writing.   A student may narrate, describe, or summarize information in good English but may produce more fractured language when trying to argue or evaluate ideas.  Rhetorical differences and reading comprehension difficulties may  also affect performance.  Overcoming these difficulties takes time, intensive language exposure, and active practice.

What may be less apparent than pronunciation or grammatical problems are the significant rhetorical differences between American academic writing and that of other cultures.  What may appear to us as disorganized, illogical, or wordy written expression may be perfectly acceptable academic prose in another culture.  While most of our international students have studied English grammar and vocabulary, many have not learned our expectations in this area.  Even European students often have to alter their writing styles to make them acceptable to American professors.  Here are some of the rhetorical conventions for writing that students may bring with them from their academic cultures contrasted with ours.
 
 

1  A Korean student:  "It was very difficult to follow the American writing style when I began to learn it. When studying in Korea, I did not learn it. Even though I did not start a paper with the main idea, my Korean professor did not take a serious view about it."

2  An Indonesian student:  "I express my opinion in a different way compared to the natives. They tend to speak everything in details while I do not. I sometimes assume that jumping into details is not really necessary. The most important thing is to state the main idea since the time given is limited."