By Titcha Ho
In her OP-ED, “Are Chinese Students Driving Educational Imperialism?” Adele Baker, a professor at Arizona State University, expressed frustration with her international students not having sufficient English proficiency to pass her history course. She hypothesized that international students couldn’t understand her lectures. Baker claimed that these students may have cheated their way into attending US colleges, guaranteeing them the golden ticket to better job opportunities back in their home countries.
Baker’s sweeping generalization aside, understanding class lectures and readings is more complicated than simply having enough English. My experiences have taught me that it is possible for multilingual students to know the definition of the words and still fail to make sense of class readings or lectures. The missing link here is US cultural knowledge, which American professors often assume all students have. As a matter of fact, even after 15 years of American acculturation, I am still learning cultural concepts.
To better explain how the lack of US cultural knowledge hinders students from comprehending class material, I am citing two examples. Student A had to write an essay for her class. The essay asked how the current U.S. educational system still catered to producing factory workers (the industrial society) without changing it to fit the evolving global economic landscape. Not for lack of trying, the student’s copy was marked all over with definitions of words she did not know, written in her language. From our discussion, however, I learned that she did not quite understand the overall meaning of the text. I took time to explain why the author thought it would be difficult to call for changes in American education considering all the stakeholders in place. I talked about the roles of lobbyists in American politics, a concept that multilingual students cannot just simply go to an English to “insert language here” dictionary to understand. Similarly, Student B had to write an essay on George Orwell. She was able to recap what was stated in the text, but her analysis was lacking. In this case, the missing cultural knowledge was the concept of Big Brother, despite the fact that the essay she read had nothing to do with Nineteen Eighty-Four. After discussing what words typically came to me when I thought of Orwell, she was able to understand the text and structure her overall argument. These experiences tell me that cultural knowledge is crucial to “connect the dots and take it to the next level”—critical thinking. As college teachers, we are uniquely positioned to scaffold our curriculum in a way that will help students, including multilingual students, in their learning process.
So what can be done to support multilingual students, along with students who are unaware of US cultural context? In fact, the way to tweak our current practice is very simple. Take time to think of ourselves as outsiders looking into American culture. What aspects of cultural knowledge do students need to know in order to understand the given text? Similar to how an academic journal article lists related terms, listing key terms for students to look up might help them understand our US-centric curriculum. Instead of accusing students of cheating on their TOEFL tests or “not having enough English to succeed,” we as educators should examine our curriculum. Expecting first-year students who are multilingual or come from intercultural backgrounds to readily understand material from The Atlantic or The New Yorker without providing sufficient cultural knowledge is setting students up for failure. Imagine, if you will, inviting American football players to compete in a “futbol” game against professional futbol players: obviously, they are going to lose. They would lose not because they are bad athletes, but because they lack the cultural knowledge of the game to compete equally. They are just in the wrong game. Given the proper training and context, they would probably become great “futbol” players—so don’t hate the players, hate the game.
Published November 12, 2015
