English Stumps Foreign College Assistants : Lack of Language Training Makes Teaching Tough on Them, Students

Most of the UC San Diego undergraduates taking Sen Li’s basic chemistry section this quarter don’t know that their teaching assistant barely spoke English only seven months ago, before leaving his home in Chengdu, China, to begin doctoral work at the La Jolla campus.

As the class crowds around Li for extra problem-solving after the hour session is over, a few aren’t even certain that Li is a foreign graduate student, given the hard work he has put in to improve his pronunciation and to learn about the work and personal habits of the American college student.

Contrast Li’s competence to the nightmare in the economics course that junior Carin Lenk took last quarter. Her class went through four foreign teaching assistants (TAs) before a fifth turned up who was able to understand the questions being asked by students. At one point, some students took to laughing at the TAs struggling in front of the class with their English.

Increasingly, at UCSD and other top research universities nationwide, the TAs teaching American undergraduates--especially in the physical sciences, engineering and economics--tend to be foreign graduate students, a majority of them from Asian countries.

And many are struggling with their teaching responsibilities, resulting in frustration not only for them but for their students.

“A lot of students ask: ‘Why do they put a TA (who can’t communicate) here?’ ” Lenk said. “No one blames the TA himself, but when your parents may be spending $8,000 a year on your education and you can’t understand what’s being taught, it’s really frustrating.”

That feeling is heightened by the intense competition among students at the science-oriented school. “You have to pick up the knowledge (from a section) somehow,” junior Tom Rhee said. “And when you have a TA who can’t answer specific questions, it just makes you have to work that much harder to get the (information), like going to another section, or to the professor, or wherever.”

No one doubts the ability of foreign graduate students to perform doctoral research, be it physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science or a host of other fields at U.S. universities, where foreign students now compose a third or more of the graduate student total.

They represent the cream of the crop in their own countries, and their presence in the United States allows universities such as UCSD to maintain top research quality in graduate departments. This comes at a time when greater numbers of American universities are competing for a smaller pool of American graduate students because private industry lures away many potential candidates.

But these same foreign students have little inkling of the teaching requirements demanded of graduate scholars at major American universities. At most institutions, much of the undergraduate instruction, especially during freshman and sophomore years, is taught in small sections by graduate students who explain and fill out concepts that undergraduates first hear in crowded lectures from professors.

As the number of foreign students has grown, so has the number of foreign TAs. And in many cases, foreign students have had only limited experience in speaking the everyday English used in classrooms. The language qualification tests they take before coming to the United States measure written comprehension, not spoken English.

Add to limited language comprehension the unfamiliarity with American classroom customs--which are far more informal and verbal than those usually found in home countries--and the result all too often becomes teaching assistants ill-equipped to teach and undergraduates upset at their inability to comprehend.

“Most want to be good TAs, but they have never had to plan and teach an entire course, to talk for an entire hour, and--in a big difference from the same problems sometimes faced by American TAs--they have to do it in a language they’ve never used on a daily basis before to undergraduates they’ve never encountered before,” said Martha Stacklin, an English-as-a-second-language teacher at UCSD.

In an effort to improve matters at UCSD, several graduate departments, beginning with chemistry, have hired Stacklin to teach a special course to foreign TAs on language improvement and teaching and cultural skills. The university’s office of graduate affairs, keenly aware of complaints about poorly-prepared TAs, is planning to expand Stacklin’s program into a campuswide requirement covering all departments, perhaps to take effect next fall.

The foreign students themselves know of their shortcomings, and those who have taken Stacklin’s course speak highly of its benefits.

“The hardest thing for me is the education difference, since we really don’t have TAs like here in China,” Li, the chemistry teaching assistant, said. “ When I came, I said, ‘What is a TA? And I have to do this in five weeks!’

“I don’t think the language problems (per se) have been as hard as I expected, since chemistry is the same around the world, but the interpersonal interaction is the hardest part. Students here are always questioning.”

For the past two years, all foreign students in the chemistry department have been required to take Stacklin’s course and pass a special exam she administers before they can become TAs. This year, the graduate departments of math, physics, economics, electrical engineering and computer science, and visual arts have added that requirement for newly-entered foreign students, although not all demand the course be completed before the students begin teaching.

Those TAs who have taken Stacklin’s course, such as Li, have generally scored much higher on evaluations received from undergraduates than those who begin without any special training. Stacklin works on pronunciation and emphasizes language used for instruction. She teaches TAs how to use the blackboard to minimize verbal explanations, and how to solicit questions and create a class dialogue.

“The original impetus came from the administrative affairs office in chemistry, where people were having problems communicating with the (foreign) students,” Barbara Sawrey, a department instructor who oversees chemistry TA training, said.

“And since they see the graduate students on a daily basis, we could imagine what problems that undergraduates might be facing . . . the result of the course has been a large improvement in the self-confidence level and attitude of the students in how they go about as a TA.”

Chemistry professors were the first to allocate department monies to fund Stacklin’s course, at $400 per student.

“That brings up a tricky situation,” said John Andrews, director of the TA training development office at UCSD, which gives six hours of university-funded general workshops to all TAs--American or foreign--before they begin teaching. In 1984, Andrews, along with American graduate student Claire Langham, drew up a demonstration project especially for foreign students out of which Stacklin’s work has grown.

“Some departments like chemistry and physics have professors with large research grants which can support graduate students more easily until they are (considered qualified to) teach than can other departments like math or economics,” Andrews said. In figuring out financial support for students, departments factor in salaries from TA training as an integral part of the overall scholarship package.

“Those other departments may squawk if we require (next fall) that all students have to pass a test before they can teach. Perhaps there’s a middle ground, with screening to get those clearly unqualified to teach into a class before they become TAs, and letting others teach while in the course.”

Xiaguang Shi was pressed into a TA position in the communications department 16 days after she arrived to pursue a doctorate at UCSD, having taken leave from her position as a reporter for the prestigious People’s Daily in Beijing.

“I didn’t even know how to call roll,” Shi recalled, laughing now at her predicament. Shi believes that the intercultural nature of the course she taught both helped and hurt: Her students took a keen interest in her background but needed more fluent instruction than she could initially provide.

Shi’s department, like many, does not provide money for its foreign students to take Stacklin’s course, and the $400 cost is too much for students already on tight budgets. So Shi benefited only from a three-day retreat with other foreign students at a desert resort in September intended mainly as an ice-breaker and an introduction to America.

“It was very beautiful, and we had fun, but I learned nothing,” Shi said. “No one told me about teaching methods, about the American undergraduate.

“But (after I began teaching) I was lucky to have a graduate student classmate who helped me a lot, who told me what to do, how to plan a section and how to focus on a subject.”

While the potential for racial backlash exists because of poor teaching by some foreign graduate students, almost everyone at UCSD--graduates and undergraduates alike--says that racially-tinged comments have been rare.

“It’s minor, although if someone has latent prejudice and they end up with a Chinese student speaking poorly, then that prejudice could be activated,” Andrews said.

“It’s more that when students encounter an Asian face, they are more likely to have preconceived notions that they will not understand that person if they have a foreign accent,” said Ralph Janes, a foreign graduate student in drama from England. “Even I have encountered that occasionally with people who say ‘pardon’ when they hear me even though they understood perfectly well.”

Stacklin said that many undergraduates at UCSD have never met a foreign student and judge too quickly--sometimes in the first five minutes of the first section--whether they like a TA or not.

“Imagine how the TA feels when the students walk out,” Stacklin said, adding that most foreign TAs take the snubs without obvious anger and spend even more of their busy graduate schedule at the language lab or at her office hours.

Like their American counterparts, some foreign TAs will never be more than mediocre teachers.

“My job is at least to bring them to a certain (minimum) level,” Stacklin said.

“But I get the most satisfaction from students who come here from far away, and win over American students intellectually and culturally through their ability to succeed. When that happens, I think they also give us a different, perhaps even a better perspective on things.”