hilltopics Images People Features 6A Friday September 29, 2000 For comments, contact Clay McCuistion at 364-4924 or e-mail features@kansan.com
Friday, September 29, 2000
Speaking the language creates problems for international students
She was not a babv.
"That happened my first year at KU," Hoshino said. "After listening to my English, my friend said, 'You sound like a baby.' I know that she didn't intend to, but being called 'baby' really hurt my self-esteem."
Studying in a foreign country in a foreign language can be difficult because of the culture, food or distance from friends and family. For many international students, the difficulty is mostly in language. The barrier in communication comes from things as complex as brain function, as simple as as age and as diverse as cultural background.
Howard Pollock, language specialist at the Applied English Center, said international students' anxieties mostly came
from spoken communication. They often think their English isn't good enough to get their point across, Pollock said.
In Hoshino's first year at the University of Kansas, her troubles — both academic and social — came from her inability to communicate in English.
Hoshino said that four years ago she couldn't communicate well enough to greet American students.
"I was living in a dormitory, and I got a good RA," she said. "She always said, 'How are
you?' I could respond to it but I couldn't understand 'How is it going?' Then I just repeated, 'Pardon?' Our conversation stopped when she said 'Never mind."
Hoshino's efforts didn't lead to long conversations with her resident assistant. Hoshino simply began to avoid her. After that experience, Hoshino said she withdrew from conversations with English
versations with English speakers.
"Even now, I am not good at speaking English," she said.
Hoshino said that she felt self-conscious in English conversations and that people treated her as if she were a child. She is passive in classes.
"I have a question, but I don't know how to ask it," she said.
She said she felt uncomfortable going to class and ended up disliking her instructors.
Language mechanics
Hoshino's troubles in English, along with other international students, come from deep-seeded difficulties in pronunciation. She can't pronounce "oil" correctly
because Japanese doesn't have an "I" sound.
KU professors who teach English to such students and study word recognition said that it might help Hoshino if she actually did think like a baby.
Greg Simpson, professor of psychology, studies word recognition. He said pronunciation was one of the most difficult parts in learning a foreign language.
Simpson said the younger people were, the easier it was for them to learn a foreign language. Children and adults have different abilities in recognizing words, he said.
"Children's brains are very plastic," Simpson said. "When we are born, we are ready for any language."
Simpson said the brains of people who grew up in a single-language environment were tuned to only one language.
"After a brain loses its flexibility, it is difficult to acquire another sound system without influence of your original sound," he said.
Simpson said the brain was fully developed in recognizing languages at around 12 years old, and it was rare to be able to pronounce a foreign language with native-speaker fluency if it was not learned by age 12.
Pressure to perform
The difference between children and adults learning a foreign language goes beyond word recognition.
Simpson said adults had tremendous amounts of pressure to communicate.
Language specialist Pollock said adults were more serious about how they spoke than children because adults were expected to be competitive in college and business. He said such pressures made college students and business people rigid in learning and communicating in a foreign language. Children, on the other hand, face less pressure than students and business people.
Martha Harris, also a language specialist at the Applied English Center, agreed that the older a person gets, the harder it was to learn a foreign language. She said children were just trying to communicate while adults were more analytical. The English center offers all levels of English language classes to students and scholars from around the world.
When international students come to the University, they must score at least 590 on the Test of English as a Foreign Language or take the center's classes until they pass a proficiency test.
"Typically, adults are not happy just talking," Harris said. "They try to figure out what the rules are in English."
Some of the international students who come to the United States have good academic skills in grammar and reading, but when it comes to conversation, they don't perform well.
Cultural differences
Paul Leon Markham, associate profes sor of curriculum and instruction. teaches a graduate course titled Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.
He said many international students' skills in spoken English were weak. Although Arabic students are often orally fluent, Japanese and Taiwanese students usually aren't that fluent, he said.
"My biggest concern with most international students who are coming to this country is too much focus on grammar of the language and reading comprehension," Markham said.
Markham teaches prospective English teachers to understand their students' cultural backgrounds.
He said strong abilities in grammar and reading and weak abilities in speaking came from testing systems used in international students' home countries. Because a written testing system is required to measure students' academic levels, he said, they often don't have a motivation to speak.
In some Asian and Middle Eastern countries, speaking up in class — in any language — is a foreign concept, Markham said. In fact, he said, students are expected to participate and speak up more in classes in the United States than in any other country.
The need for confidence
Some students don't think they have the vocabulary to express themselves because they often are unable to say what they want.
"You have to be willing to allow yourself to make millions of mistakes," Markham said.
To help ease the anxieties and pressures of learning and speaking a foreign language, teachers need to work on giving confidence to their students, Pollock said.
In his class, Pollock's primary concern in not developing students' English skills but in giving them confidence.
"I try to find the opportunities to give them a little bit of hope. Let them try, try, try," Pollock said. "In a college-level class, a professor generally doesn't have to do that."
"I try to get people to talk so I can understand where their strengths and weaknesses are," Pollock said.
He also tries to make his students recognize how they relate to others. He said working with small groups and pairs of students was a good way to start learning a foreign language because of the lower pressure in those situations.
Hoshino said she had solved some of her English difficulty.
"I had an American roommate and practiced casual conversation with her," she said.
"The class was not a required class, but I wanted to practice English speaking more," she said.
Edited by Amy Randolph
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