The first year of a college experience may be particularly challenging for international students. As students quickly discover the differences between the education systems in their home countries and the United States, they may feel overwhelmed and perhaps even unprepared. Additional trials may also include language barriers, culture shock, intercultural conflicts, and immigration regulations, to name a few. Therefore, it becomes vital that institutions provide a positive learning environment for international students and alleviate the challenges of that first critical year, so that students may successfully integrate into the U.S. academic discourse community.

Freshman composition classes, which come as a requirement in many universities across the country, are not exceptions to these issues. Normally, international students are placed in mainstream writing courses. Although some universities offer alternative options, such as basic writing classes, ESL writing classes, and cross-cultural classes, students’ challenges are still apparent, partially due to the disadvantages that each of these placement options holds (Braine, 1996; Matsuda & Silva, 1999; Silva, 1994). In fact, Silva (1994) discusses these drawbacks when addressing the issue of the placement of ESL students in first-year composition classes. In his opinion, many ESL students may find basic writing classes ineffective because such classes are normally designed to meet the needs of inexperienced native writers instead of the needs of L2 writes, who often have quite sophisticated writing abilities in their mother tongue. Silva also believes that ESL writing classes are frequently viewed as remedial and “given second class status” (p. 40). Additionally, cross-cultural composition classes, which aim to help students develop their intercultural competence by offering a curriculum based on cross-cultural objectives, are hard to implement in a college composition program (also see Matsuda & Silva, 1999).

Considering the Issues

My interest to this topic can be explained by two factors. First, it resonates with me because I have experienced some of the above difficulties by being an international student myself. However, the greater proportion of my motivation comes from my current professional position. I am teaching a first-year composition class—a required freshman course. In my first class last year, 6 out of 18 students were international; the following semester, I only had one international student in a class of 20. I kept asking myself whether my class was able to offer an effective learning environment for these freshly arrived international students. At the same time, I wondered whether they would better benefit from a freshman composition course designed specifically for international students. Thinking about potential drawbacks of both “mainstream” and “international options,” I wanted to find out whether there is a preferable option for ESL writers within the American academic writing discourse community.

These questions inspired me to examine studies on the challenges that international students face in first-year composition courses. Among a broad range of the problems that ESL writers may face in college writing classrooms, I chose to focus my attention primarily on the process of their cultural and social adjustment. Indeed, coming to the American classroom, international students bring along with them their distinct worldviews, norms, and values that impact their classroom behavior, ideas, actions, and communication patterns. Their deeply held beliefs and strongly ingrained habits may be in conflict with those of American students, as well as with certain expectations established in the U.S. college classroom discourse. The outcomes of these intercultural contacts undoubtedly affect international students’ classroom performance and their transition into the American academic community. Furthermore, while U.S. academic culture may not be explicitly taught in the classroom, the elements of it are woven into class discussions, writing topics, and so forth, and thus the culture is part and parcel of composition courses.

What the Research Says

An abbreviated selection of the studies that I examined is provided in the reference and resources lists. The list includes studies in which the issue of ESL students in first-year composition classes was the central focus. The analysis of these studies allowed me to draw the following conclusions.

Many researchers admitted that international students often go through challenging emotional trials resulting from what students themselves characterize as the negative social environment of writing classrooms (Braine, 1996; Harklau, 1994; Hsieh, 2007). The participants in these studies reported being perceived by their classmates as deficient, incompetent, and unintelligent. Because they did not participate in class discussions and group assignments as actively as their native speaking counterparts, they felt that their American classmates considered them not worth paying attention to and even viewed their silence as a “sign of stupidity” (Hsieh, 2007, p. 385).

In addition to cataloguing the difficulties of international students in freshman composition courses, almost all the studies I looked at attempted to explain the reasons for student discomfort. In Hsieh’s (2007) study, for example, the cause of one participant’s silence was the imbalance of power relations between international and American students, which was sensed by the participant in all of her American classrooms. In other cases, this seeming passiveness was attributed to the incompatibility of American culture and the international students’ cultures (Atkinson & Ramanathan, 1995; Braine, 1996; Harris, 1997; Leki, 1992).

In general, cultural differences were discovered to be the major obstacle for establishing positive social interactions in writing classrooms and the reason for the ESL students’ marginalized positions. Additionally, the dissimilarities between the L1 and L2 cultural values seemed to put certain limits on students’ capacities to produce quality work in English. The most obvious limits were caused by the “culturally-colored” (Silva, 1997) character of classroom discussions and course writing assignments (Atkinson & Ramanathan, 1995; Leki, 1992; Silva, 1997) as well as culturally loaded textbooks of mainstream classes, which are aimed at the average American student. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that in these circumstances in which international students feel they have little to contribute due to the lack of thematic knowledge resulting from their cultural naivetés (Leki, 1992), these writers frequently confront the phenomenon of writer’s block (Corbett, 1998).

Suggestions

Based on the analysis of these studies, the following recommendations can be made for program administrators and composition teachers:

• Provide academic support for second language writers. Because for some institutions it may be difficult, due to financial and curricular restrictions, to offer multiple options for the placement of ESL writers in freshman composition courses, writing instructors and program administrators should strive to provide various types of academic support for ESL writers to meet their needs. This support may come in the form of tutoring, writing study buddies, workshops, and writing center tutorials.
• Establish a positive learning environment in the classroom. This is certainly a teacher’s responsibility—to be able to establish a positive classroom atmosphere where all students will feel appreciated and respected. Teachers need to make foreign students feel that their cultural norms are valued and that their experiences contribute to the ultimate academic success of everyone in class.
• Develop cross-cultural competence in American students. Because some international students may experience a feeling of being perceived as incompetent (Hsieh, 2007), it becomes particularly crucial to integrate activities that help American students appreciate diversity and be more tolerant towards their international counterparts.

References

Atkinson, D., & Ramanathan, V. (1995). Cultures of writing: An ethnographic comparison of L1 and L2 university writing/language programs. TESOL Quarterly, 29, 539–568.

Braine, G. (1996). ESL students in first-year writing courses: ESL versus mainstream classes. Journal of Second Language Writing, 5, 91–107.

Corbett, J. (1998, April). Narrative difference: A cross-cultural approach to writer’s block. Paper presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Chicago, IL.

Harklau, L. (1994). ESL versus mainstream classes: Contrasting L2 learning environments. TESOL Quarterly, 28, 241–272.

Harris, M. (1997). Cultural conflict in the writing center: Expectations and assumptions of ESL students. In C. Severino, J. Guerra, & J. Butler (Eds.), Writing in multicultural settings (pp. 220–233). New York: The Modern Language Association of America.

Hsieh, M. (2007). Challenges for international students in higher education: One student’s narrated story of invisibility and struggle. College Student Journal, 41(2), 379–391.

Leki, I. (1992). Writing behaviors. In I. Leki (Ed.), Understanding ESL writers: A guide for teachers (pp. 61–75). Portsmouth, NH : Boynton/Cook Publishers .

Matsuda, P., & Silva, T. (1999). Cross-cultural composition: Mediated integration of U.S. and international students. Composition Studies, 29(1), 15–30.

Silva, T. (1994). An examination of writing program administrators’ options for the placement of ESL students in first year writing classes. WAP, 18(1-2), 37–43.

Silva, T. (1997). On the ethical treatment of ESL writers. TESOL Quarterly, 31, 359–363.

Additional Resources

Harrison, N. (2012). Investigating the impact of personality and early life experiences on intercultural interaction in internationalized universities. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 36, 224–237.

Kennedy, B. (1993). Non-native speakers as students in first-year composition classes with native speakers: How can writing tutors help? The Writing Center Journal, 13(2), 27–38.

Ostler, S. (1986). Writing problems of international students in the college composition classroom. The Writing Instructor, 5, 177–189.

Ramanathan, V., & Atkinson D. (1999). Individualism, academic writing, and ESL writers. Journal of Second Language Writing, 8(1), 45–75.

Elena Shvidko is a PhD student in the Department of English at Purdue University. Her research interests include second language acquisition, second language writing, and pedagogical approaches to languages and cultures.