As part of an induction to a pre-sessional programme for postgraduates that I will be teaching on this summer, I attended a session with several academics from four different disciplinary areas (Education, Engineering, Management, Biological Sciences) to discuss the particular issues that their international students faced. This was very useful not only because it enables pre-sessional teachers to make the preparatory course more relevant, but it also helps to raise disciplinary academics’ awareness of possible ways to ease communication with international students. Here in this blog post I list the main points that were discussed and the general advice the academics would like imparted to the students.
Linguistic
The English language issues raised were:
- Relatively slow speed of reading made getting through the reading load very, very challenging (this has also been the major concern of most students who I have taught on postgraduate academic writing courses)
- Speed of spoken delivery meant international students might miss or misunderstand important communications
- Problems with essay organisation and written lexicogrammar, particularly impreciseness and/or superfluous words (although students who had taken pre-sessionals were recognised as typically coping much better with the writing expectations than those who hadn’t)
Social
The social issues that were identified may be related to cultural backgrounds of the students but this is not necessarily the case so I have listed them separately here:
- Shyness/lack of confidence to engage (therefore not making active contribution to lessons/group work)
- Conflict in group work (particularly big issue in Management courses) and being unable to independently negotiate/resolve problems stemming from differing expectations of group members
- Presentations – as a consequence of the two previous points, some students noticeably struggled with group presentation assessments
- Reluctance to question/challenge teachers
Cultural
Numerous cultural influences on student performance were identified:
- Postgraduates with ‘holes’ in expected undergraduate knowledge (e.g. a student who reported having only one lecture related to evolution during her BSc Biosciences degree)
- Students may not have completed any independent research before
- Different expected time limits for exams (e.g. students used to three hour exams rather than the discipline’s one hour exams)
- Rigid and inflexible deadlines (in other cultures deadlines may be more like guidelines and late submission may not be penalised)
- Students from some cultural backgrounds seemed to lack initiative and were found to be waiting for teacher guidance even for assignments where the explicit aim was for students to generate their own academic focus
Advice
The following advice was given from the faculty lecturers:
- Seek help if needed; don’t suffer in silence
- Be prepared to be proactive – knowledge gaps (or holes) are not necessarily due to language constraints so look stuff up ahead of the lecture/tutorial
- Exploit strengths and don’t dwell on weaknesses
- Engage, ask questions (and don’t be afraid to challenge the teacher), contribute, try things out and experiment – be brave!