Academic Culture Shock in the Global Pathways Program at Northeastern University

In the field of international education, culture shock has been thoroughly and extensively studied. Culture shock has been defined in various ways, but in general it can be described as the feelings of anxiety, disorientation, or confusion people feel when they move to a new, usually foreign, environment. Feelings associated with culture shock can be caused by any aspect of life in the foreign environment, from the day-to-day, such as figuring out how to use an ATM, to interpersonal relationships, the social structure, and everything that comprises the culture.

I want to suggest that those in international educational situations confront a more specific form of culture shock: I use the term academic culture shock, and I define it tentatively as the anxiety, disorientation, or confusion brought about by a mismatch in expectations between instructors and students in teaching/learning environments in which the instructor and students come from different cultures. Academic culture shock is not a widely used term, and though much research has been carried out on multicultural classrooms, there is no body of work which deals with academic culture shock as such in the field of international education. Yet there is no doubt that studying or teaching in a foreign culture does have the potential to create anxiety, disorientation, and confusion in the learning environment and it is important to understand this phenomenon, since it may affect the educational experience and its outcomes.

Many colleges provide advice to international students on their campuses, and to American students embarking on study abroad. For example, they inform students about the ‘stages of culture shock,’ warn them about the feelings that they may experience, and reassure them that such feelings are normal. However, there does not appear to be recognition of, or a systematic attempt to address, academic culture shock. The question I ask in this study is, “In what ways is academic culture shock experienced in the Northeastern University Global Pathways program, and to what extent is it problematic?”

Background to the Global Pathways Program

Global Pathways at Northeastern University potentially offers a rich source of data for exploring academic culture shock. Global Pathways is one of a growing number of ‘pathway’ programs in the UK and the U.S. designed to offer international students academic, language, and cultural preparation in the university setting prior to entering their degree programs. The Global Pathways curriculum offers English language classes focused on academic purposes, and content-area classes related to the students’ intended field of study. Students entering Global Pathways are admitted to undergraduate or graduate degree programs conditional upon completing the program successfully and meeting any other departmental requirements.
As Director of the Global Pathways program at Northeastern University, I am interested in the ways in which academic culture shock is experienced by the students – mostly Chinese at this time - and instructors in the program. My ultimate goal is to be able to advise students, instructors, and administrators about the problems faced in this intercultural teaching environment, and how to avoid or overcome them.

Literature Review

While there is no identifiable body of literature on academic culture shock itself, studies from the field of international education illustrate the concept. The examples I have selected to review here are centered on experiences involving students from Asian countries, particularly mainland China. Mainland Chinese students make up the majority of students in the Global Pathways program.
Ouyang (2003), in an article that was the main inspiration for this study, reported on how students of English at a Chinese university evaluated foreign teachers – from the UK, the USA, Canada, and Australia - who had been recruited to promote communicative language teaching in the university. Ouyang discovered that conflicting ideologies underlying Chinese and western education systems – collectivist and hierarchical on the one hand, and based on ideas of freedom, equality, and independence on the other – played out in a number of ways in this environment. The students’ evaluations were largely negative: approximately 70% of the foreign teachers were criticized by them.

Chief among the criticisms was a casualness in the foreign teachers’ delivery of their classes, which the students believed contrasted with the planned, systematic, and linear approach taken by the Chinese teachers to whom they were accustomed. The foreign teachers appeared to the students not to have thoroughly prepared their lessons; they seemed to engage in improvisational talk rather than planned lecture; and they made little if any use of the blackboard. Students were unable to take notes, and felt they had not learned anything useful at the end of lessons. Foreign teachers’ apparent attempts to make their lessons ‘fun’ were perceived by their students as lacking seriousness, and as one student complained, “the foreign teachers usually treat us like kindergarten kids” (p. 129). While students believed that extensive error correction by the teacher was essential for their learning, they found that the foreign teachers failed to correct their errors (see also Shin (2007) below). Lack of, or minimal error correction is consistent with some interpretations of communicative language teaching, in which the successful communication of meaning is viewed as paramount; but to the students who complained, teachers who failed to correct errors were failing to do their job.

Interestingly, of the 10 – 15% of foreign teachers who were praised for their teaching, about half were considered to have ‘gone native;’ they had incorporated Chinese teaching methodology into their teaching, and had brought their work into line with Chinese standards of excellence. Ironically, the very value the foreign teachers were expected to bring – knowledge and implementation of the western teaching style – brought criticism on those teachers. Ouyang explained this by proposing that the criticisms “are often results of students adopting the standard for ideal teachers and teaching and using it to measure the foreign teachers’ teaching performance and roles” (p. 127).

While Ouyang’s paper discussed western teachers in China, others have looked into the experiences of Chinese students abroad. Gu (2009) described three studies of Chinese students in UK higher education. The first investigated the challenges these students faced as they adapted to the British higher education environment; the second focused on apparent plagiarism among these students; and the third was a general study of the students’ experiences in their first year of their undergraduate studies in British universities. According to Gu, the challenges faced by these Chinese students were culture shock, learning shock or educational shock, language shock, and role shock. Closest to my conception of academic culture shock is learning shock or educational shock, which Gu defined as, “some unpleasant feelings and difficult experiences that learners encounter when they are exposed to a new learning environment” (p. 42). I prefer to keep the definition of academic culture shock open to the possibility that teachers as well as students may experience discomfort and difficulty as a result of an unfamiliar educational environment.

Gu found evidence for the hypothesis that differences in cultural, social and historical roots between the societies from which students are drawn and in which they are currently based are most likely to lead to an uphill struggle for them to participate fully and comfortably in class activities, particularly in the initial phase of their studies (p. 43). Gu reported, though, that students adapted successfully to their new environment. The uphill struggle, in other words, did not represent a permanent handicap to these students.

In another study investigating the adaptation of international students to western education, Gilbert (2000) interviewed Japanese university students in order to try and uncover the cognitive schemata underlying university-level study in Japan and the U.S. She asked how Japanese students adapt their cognitive structures to study in the American academic environment. She suggested that because of the institutional isomorphism which makes Japanese and U.S. universities look deceptively similar on the surface – they have “academic departments, buildings, and professors….buildings contain classrooms, and professors teach students” (p. 4) - academic culture shock is more insidious than general culture shock. Gilbert quotes one study in which of the top five difficulties experienced by international undergraduate students, three are directly study related, and can be categorized as academic culture shock: “academic workload, writing papers, and class participation” (p. 6). However, she found that although colleges provided generalized advice on overcoming culture shock, “the specifics of the culture of academic institutions are ignored” (p. 12). In her own survey of Japanese students, she found that the most commonly mentioned difference, and a major source of stress for them, was classroom participation, in particular expressing their opinion or asking a question. Their anxiety over participation was exacerbated by the apparent confidence of their American classmates in expressing opinions and asking questions. Particularly salient in the perceptions of these students was the role and style of professors in the American classroom. While on the one hand American professors appeared to make their classes engaging and fun as compared with their Japanese counterparts (a positive feature, in contrast to Ouyang’s case study cited above), at the same time the students found the expectations of the American professors were higher.

While the above articles deal with the experience of academic culture shock in general, other examples can be found which illustrate how specific academic skills can be affected. Shin (2007) compared four widely-held principles of the teaching of ESL writing with the responses of five Korean graduate students in a US university to their experience of the application of these principles. In response to principle 1, “Editing should be a clean-up activity,” (p. 359) the students revealed that they struggled with language problems from the start of the writing process, and that leaving editing to the final draft stage served them poorly. Principle 2, “Composing is a process of discovering meaning” (p. 360) was contradicted by the students’ assertion that they refined their ideas before even beginning their first drafts. Principle 3, “L2 [second language] writers’ composing difficulties are largely the result of difficulties with composing than (sic) linguistic skills” (p. 361) was contradicted by the students, who claimed that non-ESL professors focused on the students’ English errors, even giving the students a lower grade for such errors. The students felt they were let down by the ESL instructors’ focus on content at the expense of form. Finally, principle 4, “Teachers comments should not be directive” (Shin, 2007) was contradicted by these students, who stated that they wanted far more directive feedback from their instructors than they were receiving. Given that these four principles are widely taught, or assumed to be good practice, in ESL teacher training programs and in ESL methodology books and articles, it is reasonable to assume that the experience of a mismatch between the teaching of ESL writing and the way ESL students actually need is widespread. This is corroborated to some extent by the fact that students in Ouyang’s study, described above, also commented negatively on their western teachers’ approach to writing instruction.

Another example of a mismatch between the expectations of students and their teachers resulted in harsh consequences for the students. The case of students found guilty of collaborating on a take-home test at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, was reported in May 2007 (Redden, 2007). The case involved a total of 34 students, but the nine who received the most severe punishment – expulsion from the school - were from Asian countries: China, Korea, and Taiwan. An attorney who filed appeals on behalf of 16 of the students claimed that the expelled students had not understood the judicial process or the honor code.

A number of issues are raised by the case. As Redden states in her article Cheating Across Cultures, many international students “come to American colleges with different conceptions of cheating” (para. 3). Plagiarism, according to Redden, can result from cultural differences, such as students not understanding the western citation style, or coming from cultures in which it is acceptable to memorize text and repeat it back to the professor. Redden adds, referring to the view of a college administrator, “In collectivist cultures…knowledge is often viewed as a shared endeavor, so “copying” doesn’t always encapsulate the same connotation” (para. 7).
This case is complicated by the fact that American students were also found to have collaborated on the take-home test, and it raises the question of whether American and international students are caught up in plagiarism and cheating allegations for essentially the same reasons, or whether cultural factors are a chief cause in the case of international students.

Finally, Schoenhals (1994) offers an intriguing example of how academic culture shock can be overcome by the efforts of their instructors. In this case, a Chinese teacher attempted to encourage interaction in her class of Chinese middle school students. That is, in this classroom, both teacher and students were from the same culture, but the teacher was attempting to overcome the limitations of the dominant and traditional teacher-fronted classroom style to which the students were accustomed. Schoenhals points to a number of studies which indicate that divergent classroom discourse styles – those which are contrary to discourse styles the students use in their daily lives outside the classroom – have a negative effect on students’ ability to participate. Conversely, discourse styles which reflect those used by the students outside the classroom can have the effect of improving participation. The Chinese teacher in Schoenhals’ study, ‘teacher Wang,’ drew on three values which are predominant in Chinese society - competitiveness, eagerness to argue, and the use of spokespersons, go-betweens and representatives – to design group activities which embodied these characteristics. The result was active student participation in her lessons, including “loud bursts of commentary or laughter,” (p. 404), “debate and refutation” (p. 407) and a relaxed atmosphere. Thus, teacher Wang was able to effect a cultural change in her classroom effectively, encouraging a new kind of classroom atmosphere and level of participation without bringing about a sense of culture shock among the students. However, some teachers who observed her classes criticized her method on the grounds that it failed to deliver sufficient “knowledge,” and did not prepare them for entrance exams, and other teachers told Schoenhals that they would like to try out an approach such as that used by teacher Wang, but were afraid of the opposition that would come from those who believed that the teacher’s role was to “give” the students knowledge. In this case then, although academic culture shock was mitigated through the efforts of the instructor, it was encountered in the wider school community.

Each of the above exhibits illustrates an incident or uncovers experiences which I believe can be categorized as academic culture shock. Clearly, the experience of academic culture shock can have academic and personal consequences for students and their instructors.

The Study

I conducted open-ended interviews (see Appendix for the interview templates) with three content-area instructors of Global Pathways classes. My aim was to identify what they believed to be their students’ main difficulties specific to their situation as international students in an American university setting. Next, I interviewed three former graduate-level Global Pathways students from China (now studying in Northeastern University master’s programs) and asked them about the difficulties they experienced in adapting to the academic culture – again, questions were open-ended. I chose to interview graduate rather than undergraduate students because the graduates would be able to compare their classes with higher education classes in their own country. I focused on Chinese students partly because they make up the majority of the student body, and partly in order to compare responses from individuals coming from similar educational and cultural backgrounds. The questions were open-ended to ensure that participants volunteered information freely without being pushed to identify any particular area as a problem, though general prompts were given if the interviewee appeared to have difficulty recalling instances and examples of academic culture shock. The term ‘academic culture shock’ was not used during the interviews.

The purpose of interviewing instructors was two-fold. First, the instructors might identify problems that students themselves do not. I wanted to compare whether instructors and students shared perceptions about difficulties in adapting to the American classroom. Second, I was interested in exploring whether the instructors themselves experienced academic culture shock, especially those who were experiencing classes of international students from one country for the first time. Academic culture shock among faculty appears to have been explored even less than among students, but it may be a fruitful area of research, especially as an increasing number of U.S. higher education institutions undertake initiatives to recruit international students.

In summary, my research project was a modest and small-scale attempt to explore academic culture shock in a program in which I am involved. Though I did not start out with a specific hypothesis, the literature review suggested I might find some or all of the following manifestations of academic culture shock in the Global Pathways program: negative reactions to the teacher’s approach or behavior; dissatisfaction with writing methodology and teacher feedback on student writing in ESL classes; apparent plagiarism or inability to use and cite sources, perhaps caused by students’ lack of understanding of western conventions; and discomfort with the demand for student participation in the American classroom.

Findings

Many of the concerns raised in the literature I reviewed were echoed by students and teachers in the Global Pathways program, yet the overall impression I gained from the interviews was one of relative ease of adaptation on both sides. In the commentary below, I refer to the teachers as Teacher 1, Teacher 2, and Teacher 3, and the students as Student 1, Student 2, and Student 3.
All three students commented on the classroom environment, its patterns of interaction, and the roles and behavior of the teacher and student. One significant difference between the Chinese and American classrooms was class size. Describing her classes in China, Student 2 stated, “We have more than 50 in a class in China…we have to prepare a big exam, so in every class, we do a lot of practice, the most thing we do is practice, and try to find the right answer.” Student 3 compared the teacher and student roles in his classes in China and their impact on classroom interaction: “In China, teacher is very strict…teacher stands in front, we sit here, just listening, sometimes we ask questions, but we can’t do so freely, we have to do it respectfully. Teacher is king of classroom. Here, classroom is much smaller than there so we have a lot of chance to speak our feelings; there, we are just listening.” Student 1 made the point that the smaller classes in Global Pathways facilitate a greater focus by the teacher on each student, which she considered positive. Student 2 commented that Global Pathways classes frequently involved group work, and that in her opinion these groups frequently failed because of the unwillingness of some group members to contribute. She said, “In China we always do the work by ourselves, we never form groups, almost never. It is pretty hard of course…some students do not like to talk every time, it’s very hard to get results from that group, some group with talking people and a group with non-talking people.” On the other hand, Student 3 described his adaptation to the American classroom and a new-found sense of freedom that came with it: “At first, I think it seems not like the classroom, because of the style of the classroom. After several classes, maybe one month, two months, I like this style better, because you have more chance to express your opinions to classmates and teachers, more chance to say what you want, very freely.” From the teachers’ side, teacher A did not believe the students’ level of participation in a Global Pathways class differed from his ‘normal’ classes: “If this was a normal class, you’d have 28 students, eight or ten of them would talk all the time, eight or ten aren’t going to raise their hands, and the other eight or ten it depends. Those same ratios hold.” However, he and all three students acknowledged that lack of confidence in English represented a significant barrier to participation, suggesting that although the outward behavior of American and international students may appear similar, the underlying cause may differ – language being the key factor in this case.

The students were positive about their relationship with their Global Pathways teachers. Student 1 reported that in China she rarely met with her teachers outside of class, whereas in the U.S. she could feel relaxed chatting with the teacher because, “the relationship is more close,” and “teachers are amiable.” Student 2 agreed, stating, “I’m okay with communication with teachers. They are open minded. They are all very nice people.” She went on to say, “Teachers and us could behave more like friends, more friendly, we can talk about the weather, or films and so on. In China, teacher is teacher, you can never ask about private things.” The difference in the student-teacher relationship did not appear to present a problem for the students, and the teachers did not comment on it. Far from being an example of academic culture shock, this appears to be a factor which facilitates their adaptation. Student 2 attributed this ease of adaptation to the exposure of young Chinese people to American behavior through the mass media: “One of my teachers ate apples in class, it never happened in China. We act like normal persons, we keep an open mind. We hear a lot of things like that, American people like sitting on desk…we had already heard about it, we saw it on TV.”

The students’ apparent familiarity with American culture and subsequent ease of adaptation to the classroom culture was a theme that ran through responses given by both students and teachers. Student 3 expressed this when I asked him if he had been surprised by any aspects of school life here in the U.S. He responded, “Not so surprising, because I was prepared. I was ready for a totally different life, so I don’t feel surprises here. I just think it’s American style. Sometimes I feel different, but not so surprised.” Teacher 1 commented, “they come in with their, you know, Hollister clothes, and their ripped jeans, and they’re American in every way, other than they’re not.”

Nonetheless, the students’ ease of adaptation may have been facilitated by their teachers’ own ability and willingness to adapt their teaching to their Global Pathway class. In particular, they highlighted the students’ lack of cultural background knowledge as a barrier to their understanding, and explained that they needed to adapt the material to make it more comprehensible to the students. For example, the same teacher who believed that “they’re American in every way, other than they’re not” stated in another part of the interview, “Because they are unfamiliar with American history and culture, the stories, you have to Powerpoint, they need pictures. You don’t necessarily have to do that with an American class. You have to pick and choose what you will talk about.” He gave an example of how he often needed to elaborate on knowledge that he might be able to take for granted among his American students. On the topic of prohibition, he said, ‘I get blank looks – why is there this fascination with drinking? American students would have knowing smiles on their faces. Not these guys.” Teacher 3 went so far as to state that the students, “come in as a blank slate,” because of “what (they) have been experiencing, what they have read, what they were taught, what the media fed them,” and she felt that, “If not for the Olympic games, it would have been worse.”

Finally, the topic of citing sources and avoiding plagiarism was raised by all the students and two of the teachers. Teacher 3 thought that the students were not aware of the difference between what she called an essay (“just to express our ideas or opinion”) and an academic assignment written according to U.S. academic standards, and she cited this as “a good example of a cultural difference, how to prepare a response paper.” Nevertheless, she believed the students would understand the expectations by the end of the semester. Teacher 2 agreed, commenting, “It’s something they have to get used to. They are not used to doing citations, but it’s still something they can pick up.” (Citing sources and paraphrasing are given strong emphasis in Global Pathways ESL classes.) However, Student 3’s comments suggest that avoiding plagiarism may not be so straightforward. He expressed frustration with the learning process: “We have to write down where everything comes from. We need to find the source of everything, that’s very important for you, but I think this is difficult, we didn’t have the habit of doing that. Sometimes we spend a lot of time to find where this sentence comes from. It’s difficult for us.” The student claimed that after completing Global Pathways, he still had problems with this, and his comments are revealing: “I finish another paper…I had to spend a lot of time to paraphrase it. It’s not only one hour, several hours rewriting sentences…I don’t know how to say these things, so paraphrase is difficult for us. In China, teachers didn’t teach us how to do this, we had to learn it here…Why do I need to paraphrase it?”

This student’s method of writing a paper appears to be to take the writing of others and to spend several hours paraphrasing it so that it appears to be his original work, rather than to generate his own response and support it with the work of others. If this is the case, then although the student may give the appearance of having learned the American norms of academic writing, he may not truly have learned the importance of developing his own thesis and producing original work.

Conclusion

There is little doubt that academic culture shock is experienced by students in the Global Pathways program. However, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions, and the study raises a number of questions. Most of the articles I discussed in the literature review did not bring to light factors which might facilitate students’ cultural adaptation to a new academic environment, yet the students in my study found that the smaller class size, relative informality, and the closer relationship with their teachers here in the U.S. allowed them to feel comfortable and learn more easily than in China. This finding is inconsistent with Ouyang’s (2003) study, cited above, which problematized the relationship between Chinese students and their foreign teachers.

The results of my study require a more subtle interpretation, however. Class size was a two-sided coin: on the one hand, it allowed greater teacher-student contact and greater opportunities for active participation; on the other, consistent with Gilbert’s (2000) finding, it may have been experienced as a burden by students who lacked the confidence to participate, for language or other reasons. Further, although the informal relationship between teachers and students was considered positive, none of the interviewees mentioned the problem of ‘where to draw the line’ in an environment in which the line between teacher and student is not so clearly drawn as in their own culture. Although this may not have been a salient issue for these interviewees, other Global Pathways teachers, not included in this study, have commented to me that students are sometimes over-familiar with them, for example raising inappropriate topics or including slang expressions in their email messages.

The main areas of academic culture shock brought to light by this study are 1) the difficulty some students have adapting to the smaller classroom because of the greater demands on them to participate (consistent with what Gilbert (2000) found; 2) students’ lack of ‘cultural capital,’ which may make lesson content unavailable to them without significant adaptation by the teacher; and 3) the lack of understanding of the need to respect the intellectual property of others through proper citation and paraphrasing. This last area is consistent with Redden’s (2007) report, though in my study there was no mention of students ‘cheating’ or ‘copying.’ Lack of cultural background knowledge was not mentioned in any of the studies I reviewed, but seems to be a key factor in students’ successful comprehension of lectures and course material, and is also the most difficult for students to overcome. A mismatch between the teachers’ and students’ expectations for feedback on students’ written work, the focus of Shin’s (2007) study, was not brought to light by my own study.

Although I focused on academic culture shock in this study, the overall impression I received from the students and teachers was that cultural adaptation represented less of a problem for the students than their language ability. This would be consistent with the ‘learning shock’ mentioned by Gu (2009). While I agree that facility with English is vital for the success of these students, I also believe that language ability alone is insufficient. While students may think that they would be successful if only their English were better, I believe that even with an excellent command of the language they will continue to experience difficulties with comprehension if they do not build up their store of cultural knowledge, which may form the backdrop to many of their lectures and written materials as they progress into their degree programs. It is questionable, however, whether they can build sufficient cultural background knowledge over the few months of Global Pathways. In order to be successful, they may need teachers who are sympathetic to their backgrounds, and who can adapt their lecture material and reading assignments to this population. Based on this finding, I have some doubts about Gu’s (2009) characterization of students’ successful adaptation to their new academic environment.

In future studies, it would be interesting to combine teacher and student interviews with classroom observations; to compare the views of the teachers of discipline-based classes with those of the (generally more internationally experienced) ESL teachers in the program; and to enlarge the study to gain a more representative sample of viewpoints. A longitudinal study of a student or a small group of students as they progress through the Global Pathways program might bring to light cultural adaptation issues the students face in a more immediate way, rather than having them rely on their memories. Nonetheless, the present study, while modest in scale, has brought to light some aspects of academic culture shock in the Global Pathways program, and can perhaps form the starting point for devising strategies to address them.




References
Gilbert, S. (2000). Japanese Students in American Higher Education: A Cross-cultural Analysis of Academic Culture. Unpublished Monograph. Stanford University.
Gu, Q. (2009). Maturity and Interculturality: Chinese students' experiences in UK higher education. European Journal of Education, 44(1), 37 - 52.
Ouyang, H. (2003). Resistance to the Communicative Method of Language Instruction within a Progressive Chinese University. In K. Anderson-Levitt (Ed.), Local Meanings, Global Schooling: Anthropology and World Culture Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Redden, E. (2007). Cheating Across Cultures. Retrieved 1.30.09, 2009, from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/05/24/cheating
Schoenhals, M. (1994). Encouraging Talk in Chinese Classrooms. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 25(4), 399 - 112.
Shin, S.-K. (2007). 'Fire your proofreader!' Grammar correction in the writing classroom. ELT Journal, 62(4), 358 - 365.