This is the second article in a two-part series examining the disparities in essay-writing styles in nations around the world. The first installment explored the American model in comparison with those of other countries. This article focuses on how Tufts provides writing support for international students, as well as the difficulties American students who study abroad face when writing.
Writing styles, citations and structures can be as diverse as the languages in which papers are written. Because the standards of intellectual honesty can vary sharply from nation to nation, some international students may be immediately put at an academic disadvantage upon coming to Tufts, especially when they are put in a class with a professor who is unaware of such variances.
"Sometimes students are penalized even if their English is perfect and they have the right idea because they are writing in an atypical style for the United States," Director of the Academic Resource Center (ARC) Carmen Lowe said. "Unless [professors] have a background with international students or have studied abroad, they most likely would not be aware that there are huge cultural differences in terms of writing."
Instead of putting the responsibility on the professor to teach the international student the American model, Tufts offers a number of other options -- from writing tutors to introductory English classes -- to help the students in question.
Lowe, for example, prior to being the Director of the ARC, formerly taught English 03 and English 04, which are the English courses geared towards international students at Tufts in lieu of the traditional English 01 and English 02 geared towards American first-year students.
While those courses are aimed at combating the discrepancies in structural essay models and academic honesty, Lowe explained they often aren't effective because they only draw a very small pool of students.
"Very few students take those classes," she said. "A lot of time, if [an international student has] scored very high on a standardized test, they assume their English is fine -- they can communicate with their roommate, they've watched a lot of English language television, and then they write their first paper, and they are not understanding why they're getting such a low grade. [But] it's not about language skills, per se; a lot of times it's about the structure."
Even if students do choose to forgo the English courses, there is another form of support available to struggling students: the graduate writing consultancy program, a faction of the ARC.
Jenny Lenkowski, a first-year graduate student in biology, works as a writing consultant and specializes in cases of plagiarism often unknowingly committed by international students uninformed about the American system of academic honesty.
Lenkowski often approaches such cases by first trying to gain a better understanding of the culture that the student came from.
"A lot of it is trying to understand the cultural differences -- when you're taught by a form of rote memorization, it's also a form of respect, because people know where these ideas are coming from," Lenkowski said. "If it's not in their native language, [often] students think, 'Why put it in my own words if they already say it so well?'"
Lenkowski explained that as a consultant, she tries to incorporate citation into the basic habits of struggling students, so they can then move on to fix simpler problems, like those with essay structure.
"The important thing here in the United States is that you cite sources to give people credit for their ideas and their words," she said. "So [our job] is to incorporate that into what students do. That's another part of it -- because Americans have been doing this kind of thing for so long, [it] comes really naturally; you write yourself a little note after a sentence if you have to cite it, and it may seem like a simple thing to do, but if you've never done that before, it actually takes a lot of practice."
Even aside from adjusting to the basic essay requirements and academic practices, many international students must adjust to differences in the American teaching process and classroom structure. It can be an adjustment to a system far less intimidating and controlled than the one of their home country.
"I know that the international students who come to Tufts from France are often astonished that professors are so accessible here, that there are tutors, and that tutoring is free -- because our educational philosophy is based on being supportive and encouraging, where in some countries, their model is to humiliate people -- we would consider it 'mean,' but in those countries, it just means being rigorous, and holding high standards," Lowe said. "I don't think some country's cultures would be even supportive of the idea that we should make resources available to students."
In fact, it is those rigors emblematic of other cultures, as well as the differences in general writing structure, that tend to represent the biggest challenges to American students when studying abroad.
"Many students who study abroad are more concerned about their language skills, like their vocabulary and their grammar, but when they get there, they are confronted with this dramatically different style of writing -- which can be the structure of the ideas, or they way in which you are supposed to present them -- whether you're supposed to be direct or indirect and flowery," Lowe said.
Senior Victor Nascimento, who studied abroad in Spain through the Tufts-in-Madrid program last year, encountered a situation similar to the one Lowe described.
"In Spain, they put less emphasis on structure and organization: They allow for more flexibility than they do in the American version of essay writing," Nascimento said. "In the U.S., we're often taught that in an essay, we have to re-state people's ideas in a different way and draw our own conclusions from them, whereas in Spain, it's acceptable to just rearrange the ideas without adding a personal take on them."
Senior Natalie Miyake, who also studied abroad in Madrid during her junior year, shared a similar example from her experience.
"I went in to ask my professor about formulating a thesis, and she said, 'You don't need to think of it like that -- you can think of it more like an investigation,'" Miyake said.
