Colleges Help the Faculty Adapt Teaching for Foreign Students

Jay Newell’s introductory advertising course is a large lecture class, but the Iowa State University professor prides himself on keeping students interested and engaged.

And so he was puzzled a few years ago when he noticed a knot of students who appeared checked out, unresponsive, bored. Why wasn’t he getting through to them? he wondered.

When Mr. Newell investigated, he realized the students had something in common: All were from overseas, and most were from China. Even though they had typically been at Iowa State for a couple of semesters, their English-language skills left them struggling to keep up with Mr. Newell, who, as he puts it, “speaks 150 words a minute.”

“It was clear,” the associate professor says, “that they had no idea what I was talking about.”

Mr. Newell’s experience is far from unusual. The number of foreign students on American campuses has ballooned in the last decade, increasing by nearly 75 percent. On Mr. Newell’s own campus, the growth has been even more staggering, 110 percent over 10 years.

The presence of so many foreign students is internationalizing American classrooms. Now colleges are recognizing that their faculty members, too, must become more internationally minded to meet the cultural and pedagogical needs of this new crop of students.

For professors like Mr. Newell, that means wrestling with ways to become more responsive to the challenges and learning styles of overseas students without compromising academic standards.

“My job is to make sure students learn this stuff and understand it and engage with it,” he says. When international students were falling behind, “it was my problem as much as it was theirs.”

Faculty ‘Culture Shock’

Today, close to a million foreign students study in the United States. It’s not only that those numbers are unprecedented. Unlike decades past, a majority of current international students are seeking undergraduate degrees. Those younger students can bring with them different needs than their predecessors did.

A 2015 survey by ELS Educational Services, a language-instruction provider, found that nearly half of international students identified language difficulties as their biggest classroom challenge. But significant numbers also said they struggled with class discussions, were confused about professors’ expectations, or felt uncomfortable working in small groups.

And in contrast to doctoral students, who often work closely with a handful of researchers in their field, undergraduates usually take general-education courses across the curriculum. That means more faculty members are seeing foreign students in their classes. When Mr. Newell started teaching 15 years ago, he had just a smattering of international students in his advertising course, a popular elective; they now make up about 10 percent of enrollments.

“Faculty are going through culture shock,” says Annie Greenhoe, an English-language instructor at Portland State University. “They haven’t moved anywhere, but their students have” changed.

Nor are these challenges unique to the United States. Darla K. Deardorff, executive director of the Association of International Education Administrators and an expert on cross-cultural learning, says she has been asked to speak at universities throughout Europe and Australia about how to teach in a more-international classroom.

“The urgency to address this,” Ms. Deardorff says, “isn’t confined to the U.S.”

Charles A. Calahan was an assistant professor of family studies at Purdue University much-decorated for his teaching when he got a call from the provost’s office in late 2011. Purdue, too, had experienced titanic growth in international enrollments. Would Mr. Calahan move to the university’s Center for Instructional Excellence to develop programs to help faculty members better work with this burgeoning population?

While Purdue is undertaking some ambitious projects, such as an effort to create a scale that would help faculty members measure the intercultural climate of their classrooms, many of the interventions Mr. Calahan suggests are remarkably straightforward. Among the tips he lays out in a brochure mailed to every instructor:

• Scrap academic jargon.
• Post your lecture slides, and even recordings of your lectures, online so that students can go back and review them at their own pace.
• If you’re worried about plagiarism or cheating, don’t just note prohibitions on your syllabus or mention them once on the first day of class. Bring up the policies repeatedly, especially before examinations.
• Give your students samples of correct — and incorrect — citations when assigning papers.

Estela Ene, director of the English for Academic Purposes Program at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, suggests assigning students to mixed teams of international and domestic students when working on group projects.

In seminars or discussion-heavy courses, let students know about topics that may be covered ahead of class, says Jun Liu, vice provost for global affairs at Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York system. That can give non-native English speakers time to prepare and boost their confidence.

Mr. Liu, who was born in China and whose academic speciality is intercultural communication, also encourages faculty members to stay a few minutes after class or to end sessions a minute or two early. Students from cultures like his own grow up in academic settings where it’s not OK to interrupt lectures and may be embarrassed to ask a question in front of other students because of imperfect English. “Just a couple of minutes can help students build a personal relationship with their professors,” Mr. Liu says.

As for Mr. Newell, at Iowa State, he decided to translate both his classroom slides and his syllabus into Chinese. He has also been mindful about including more non-American examples of advertising in his teaching. Occasionally, American students complain — Will I have to learn Chinese? — but most do not.

Making an Effort Counts

Xiaoyu Wang, 20, is a transfer student from China. She calls the translations useful but says the fact that Mr. Newell made the effort is the most important part. “It shows that he’s interested in Chinese students and Chinese culture,” Ms. Wang says, “and I think that’s really great.”

Mr. Newell now helps organize annual workshops on teaching foreign students. Such sessions are increasingly common. Centenary College of New Jersey holds regular brown-bag lunches where faculty members with expertise in certain regions or cultures give talks. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro has made faculty development in teaching international students a goal of its most-recent reaccreditation.

And at the beginning of each semester, Case Western Reserve University holds a seminar on pronouncing international students’ names. Students from China and elsewhere in Asia have become so sensitive about foreigners mangling their names that many have adopted English names, and during the session, professors can bring their class rosters to get tips on saying each name, says Molly J. Watkins, the university’s executive director for international affairs.

Other institutions are turning to English-language instructors as in-house consultants on working with international students. At Michigan State University, staff members at its English Language Center have formed a sort of “flash response team,” going into classrooms at professors’ request to observe and give feedback about how they might adjust their teaching to better reach international students; in some cases, they provide weekly advice.

Ms. Greenhoe, at Portland State, is one of a number of English instructors who are assigned to teach special supplementary sections for non-native speakers of “Freshmen Inquiry,” one of the university’s required general-education courses. She meets with students at least once a week outside the regular course time to help them with skills like understanding class assignments or developing tactics for speaking up during discussions. She’s also available to talk with faculty members about individual students.

Although some professors have complained that the surge in international students has altered their classroom culture, most educators contacted by The Chronicle said they had experienced little pushback in their efforts to improve faculty expertise in teaching students from abroad.

“Yes, there are definitely faculty members who say, ‘They’re here, they ought to do it our way,’” says Ms. Deardorff of the international-education association. But, she notes, “there are many different ways that students learn, no matter where they are from,” and the approaches that are successful with international students, like posting lecture slides or providing examples of properly cited work, might also help Americans.

“Changing our strategies,” Ms. Deardorff says, “doesn’t mean we are dumbing down our standards or making our courses any less rigorous.”

Karin Fischer writes about international education, colleges and the economy, and other issues. She’s on Twitter @karinfischer, and her email address is karin.fischer@chronicle.com.