Lessons often lost in translation

Senior chemistry major Bryan Corey learned about international communication the hard way in one of his upper-level math classes.

His professor, an Asian graduate student, had some communication issues, to say the least.

"She had no concept of the English language," Corey says.

Corey managed to get a B, though he says he thinks he would have scored higher if some ideas could have been explained better.

"She was very intelligent, but it's hard to teach when you don't speak the native language," he says.

The number of international graduate students at UNC has been growing recently, and campus officials have started taking steps to ensure experiences like Corey's disappear.

Seventeen percent of America's 1.4 million graduate students are from other countries. In fields like engineering, they make up more than 50 percent of enrollment, according to the Council of Graduate Schools.

In 2004, there were 968 international graduate students at UNC with 1,331 international students total, up from 1,047 the year before, with most coming from South and East Asia.

"Every international TA or faculty member is aware of the fact that it's difficult to communicate without their native tongue," says Ed Neal, the director of faculty development at the Center for Teaching and Learning. "They have no illusions about that."

And UNC tries to make it easier for its international student-teachers to adapt to a new environment.

The Graduate School first requires that all international students take the Test of English as a Foreign Language, which has listening, reading and writing sections, as well as any relevant test for their individual departments.

This month, Educational Testing Services added a speaking portion to the TOEFL after growing concerns that the test only encourages the learning of "textbook" English.

Once at UNC, students from non-English-speaking countries are required to take a placement exam, administered by the English department, which tests listening and reading comprehension.

If a student fails that, he must take English 101x, an advanced grammar and reading course - though few students fail, says Phyllis Howren, who teaches the class. A 103x course also is offered, geared toward accent reduction.

The Graduate School recently has started taking a more proactive approach to preparing international TAs for university-level teaching, Neal says.

Three years ago, it started offering the Preparing International TAs course, and the various departments around campus have been very pleased with it, says Amy Johnson, who teaches the class.

The class views old videotaped lectures, talks to veteran TAs and requires its students to have language partners. But the most important lessons are harder to teach, she says.

"I think the most important thing that is gleaned from the program from the international TAs is the awareness of cultural differences," she says.

And these can be a bigger problem than any language barrier.

"Americans really like eye contact and smiling," she says, pointing out that in many Asian countries, a pure, formal lecture format is the norm.

"If they've never taught in the American classroom, they would bring this with them without realizing and that might be rather off- putting."

Jimin Wang, a graduate student from Beijing who is enrolled in the PITA class, agrees.

"The most hard part is that I think teachers here are teaching students in a different way," he says.

"In China, the teacher talks a lot and you work from the textbook," says Wang, who taught in China for several years.

Though he's concerned about his English, subtle clues such as facial expressions and body positions - inner communication, as he calls it - worry the veteran teacher the most.

"If I am in China, I can judge what my students are thinking just by looking at them," he says. "But in the U.S., I cannot."

Johnson says she understands undergraduates' frustrations with international TAs.

But a lot of undergraduates don't understand the great opportunity they're missing if they let an accent stop them from getting to know their teacher better, she says.

Junior political science major Brian Gamberini couldn't agree more.

He had an economics TA from Taiwan, and though he had a thick accent, he related a lot of class material to what was going on in his native country.

"It really helped to spice things up a bit."

 

Contact the Features Editor at features@unc.edu.