Writing Support for International Graduate Students

Enhancing Transition and Success

Shyam Sharma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351054966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Using qualitative data collected from more than twenty universities across the US, Writing Support for International Graduate Students describes and theorizes agency- and advocacy-driven practices, programs, and policies that are most effective in helping international students learn graduate-level writing and communication skills. It uses compelling narratives and cases to illustrate a variety of program models and support practices that fostered the students' process of academic transition and success. Employing an ecological framework, the book seeks to advance academic conversation about how writing scholars/instructors and program administrators, as well as other academic service professionals working with this student body, can formulate policies, develop programs, and implement practices that best help these students grow as writers and scholars in their disciplines.

1 Introduction

Since our class entered college, the faculty has introduced … Arnold’s Latin and Greek prose composition…. Now you know probably the many disadvantages in which I labor aside from these additional studies…. I therefore request you to send me up the keys to those [texts].

(Yung Wing, a Chinese student at Yale College, 1851; Yale University library archive)

The Chinese students fail out of the program. We have never graduated the Chinese students…. I think that the challenge is that few people in the program understand that these students are shell shocked, and [instructors] don’t understand the [educational backgrounds] that these students came from. (Interview with an instructor at a California university, February 2016)

The first quotation above is from a letter sent from Yale University in 1851 by the first Chinese student to graduate from a U.S. college, named Yung Wing, to a former classmate named Albert Booth, who had moved to New York City. Brought to Connecticut four years earlier by a Christian missionary, Yung Wing had completed high school in Hartford before joining Yale College. At the end of the first year in college, he wrote to seemingly the only person he could turn to for help with purchasing the “keys” to two new Composition textbooks that he had just found out were extensively used by other students. The contents of the letter powerfully illustrate the multiple layers of challenges that students face when they pursue education in a new country and culture away from home, challenges that often extend far beyond their studies but affect their academic experience and success more than they would at home.

The second quotation is from an interview with an instructor at a business school in a public university in California who was responding to my question about what kinds of writing-related academic support was provided to international graduate students at her institution. The instructor’s response reminded me that international students still face some of the same challenges that Yung Wing did in the 1850s. While today’s international students in most American cities can find more company, are better treated by peers and professors, and can find more resources, they still encounter additional “disadvantages” that aggravate the challenges of reading, writing, and other aspects of pursuing higher education in a foreign country. Besides “additional studies” for improving and adapting their linguistic and communicative skills, they must tackle challenges related to immigration laws and political climate; deal with often overt prejudice outside campus and subtle stereotypes that obscure realities about them even within; and overcome financial, emotional, cultural, and social challenges that affect them in ways that are often not visible to those who haven’t gone through similar experiences of international education.

Yung Wing’s process of learning to write involved acquiring significant proficiency in the English language, the aspect of learning to communicate in a new place that is most visible to others. He had started learning English before he came to Hartford in 1847 from Macao, with a missionary named Samuel Brown, continuing it at a preparatory school named Monson Academy and through the mentorship of Brown’s friend, Charles Hammond. When he joined college, learning to write further demanded significant command of rhetorical conventions and communicative practices in a new culture and society. He evidently did all of that well. Unfortunately, as historical accounts of this international student indicate,¹ even after he had become proficient enough to win much-coveted composition contests, he was never accorded the same treatment and understanding as his fellow domestic students because perceptions about his language and communication were shaped by his identity as a foreigner. In a book on the history of international students in the United States, Bevis and Lucas (2008)² note that Yung Wing, even though he was engaged in student clubs and the debate team, was considered a “loner who had little social interaction although he was a common sight around campus” (44). Generally speaking, Yung Wing’s experiences reflect a critical but often overlooked dimension of foreign students’³ educational journey: how their status as outsiders affects almost every aspect of their education, including their learning and their performance of academic writing. As we can see better from a distance today, Yung Wing wrote the letter during a period when, even after his graduation in 1854, fluctuating political relations between China and the United States (including such events as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) seriously undermined his passionate but frequently unsuccessful, 58-year attempt to be an academic and social ambassador between the two nations.

My field notes from visiting 20 universities across the United States, between 2014 and 2017, as well as an analysis of the interviews that I conducted with 44 international graduate students, reveal striking patterns of challenges about the process of learning to write and communicate that are unique to international students in general and also distinct from those of their undergraduate counterparts. Interviews with three times as many scholars and academic professionals who worked closely with these students strongly reinforced the same patterns. In individual interviews and focus group conversations, students shared powerful stories about how that process was shaped and affected by a variety of challenges and realities, both in kind and degree, beyond what domestic graduate students generally encounter. For example, a doctoral student in pharmacology at the University of Louisiana, Monroe, whom I call “Vijay,” ⁴ said that he was “completely lost” during class discussions when he first arrived because he couldn’t make sense of the rhetorical moves made by the professor and his classmates. He struggled to remain motivated due to social isolation and continued culture shock and almost had to discontinue his degree when his grant-based funding ended (given his visa status). He did not know about writing support before he tried it and then found it inadequate. Eventually, he learned to create and use his own ad hoc networks of support toward eventual success. As with many other students I interviewed, faculty and staff members who paid attention to what Vijay was facing as an international student better understood political and ideological forces/realities against which he learned to academically succeed (the subject of Chapter 2 in this book). Their attention to Vijay’s true needs helped faculty advisors and academic support professionals develop better perspectives for supporting international graduate students (the subject of Chapter 3).

The key factor that enables international students to more quickly and effectively learn and use writing skills for navigating a new academic culture and for negotiating their intellectual positions is the design of support that fosters their own agency to explore the ecology of resources at their disposal (Chapter 4). This agency best thrives when support is driven by advocacy for the students (Chapter 5). While the experiences of individual students I interviewed were unique, and the issues discussed by the academic professionals I interviewed were contingent on their distinct institutional contexts, my research identified significant correlations between seemingly extraneous forces and students’ process of learning to write, interactions that deserve exploration in the context of graduate-level writing support for these students as international students. Thus, I view “writing support” as a means for helping students to learn and use writing skills in the broader context of academic and professional “communication”—in the same sense as the emerging professional community uses the term “graduate-level communication.” Furthermore, in the case of international graduate students, I consider learning to write as a complex puzzle requiring a number of linguistic, rhetorical, cultural, and social skills that they must gather from a variety of places and processes, formal and informal, visible or invisible to writing support professionals.

The demographic that this book focuses on is the more than half a million foreign students at the graduate level in the United States (ICE, 2017),⁵ roughly a third of whom are new to American academic culture when they first arrive from around the world every year.⁶ Whether permanent residents, refugees on any status, or undocumented students, students with prior education in other countries are typically excluded by the term “international” due to a definitional focus on immigration status; however, the thematic scope of this book includes all students, in any visa/immigration status, who received all or nearly most of their pre-graduate education outside the US.⁷ The academic professionals⁸ I interviewed for this book included writing scholars and researchers, instructors of writing and of language who taught writing skills, faculty advisors and graduate program directors in other departments, administrators and staff members in various academic support units, graduate deans and deans of specific schools, and a few institutional leaders above the level of deans. These professionals encompassed the broader ecology in which the students learned graduate-level writing and communication skills.

The goal of this book is not to present a full and objective picture of graduate writing support for international students in the United States, but to describe and draw theoretical insights from the findings of a research project that studied what made a number of selected programs⁹ most useful for foreign students, further exploring how these students use additional support and resources available in the larger ecology of their institutions. My objective was also not to present program profiles¹⁰ since I did not study the programs long-term or extensively; my focus was to analyze data from across institutions in order to identify important issues about programs and pedagogies while also discussing policy implications. While I revisited some institutions, conducted follow-up interviews remotely about others, then gathered additional information about all programs from secondary sources, I used the data collected principally to explore themes emerging from reiterative analysis of the data. Similarly, the narratives that I have chosen for discussing student experiences are only meant to be illustrative of salient themes that I identified from analyzing the data, rather than being considered case studies of students. I also use themes emerging from perspectives shared by academic scholars and professionals working with international graduate students as the basis for discussing broader geopolitical issues that shape and influence international education. So, I encourage readers to pay attention to the situatedness of the programs and support practices, themes in students’ experiences, and perspectives shared by academic professionals who worked with the students. I hope this book will add to and help foreground additional topics and themes about international students in conversations about graduate-level writing support in the United States and, hopefully, beyond.

Study Design and Data Collection

Between the spring of 2014 and summer of 2017, I conducted 168 interviews, of which 12 were follow-ups. Among them, I transcribed 157 interviews for coding and analysis, excluding 11 interviews that didn’t provide considerable context or focus vis-à-vis my project objective. Among the interviews included, four were with groups of students with an average of six participants, four more involved faculty and staff members with an average of six participants, and five were with two academic professionals each. The total number of individuals involved was 191. Most of the interviews were conducted at 20 university campuses,¹¹ and 22 of them were conducted at six academic conferences (for the most part early in the process); seven of the initial interviews were by phone/videoconferencing; two were by email, with participants who requested that as the medium. Including the institutions of participants whom I interviewed virtually or at conferences increases the number of universities studied to 35. Most of the follow-ups were conducted by phone, and new participants were interviewed when revisiting four of the 20 visited institutions. Research consent was acquired by asking interviewees to sign them before interviews done in person; they were secured by email in other cases.

It would be too complicated to describe all the overlapping roles of participants, but to focus mainly on the primary roles, 16 of the 157 interviews were with writing program or writing center directors (including six graduate writing support specialists); nine associate directors or coordinators of writing programs; 32 writing instructors, including seven ESL specialists (19 of whom also did research); 19 directors/coordinators of academic services (such as English language support, international teaching assistants support, library support, student success centers, and centers for teaching and learning); 27 staff members in the academic services just mentioned; six directors of international student offices and seven academic liaisons/coordinators who worked in or with international centers; 22 faculty members from other disciplines (one retired), including six heads of academic programs or departments; four university administrators (vice presidents and vice provosts); 11 deans (including five graduate deans); 44 international graduate students (11 of them graduate ...