Chronicle of Higher Education
The China Conundrum: a Student Perspective
January 16, 2013, 12:58 pm
Following is a guest post by Yeran Zhou, an undergraduate from China studying in the United States.
The number of Chinese students at American universities continues to grow, but those students often have trouble adjusting to the American classroom. I shouldknow. As one of almost 200,000 students from China that are now pouring intocampuses across the country, I have seen the difficulties firsthand.
In a 2011 article, “The China Conundrum,” The Chronicle showed that many Chinese students speak poor English and participate little in class,in part because of the language deficiency. I agree it’s a problem. Istudied for two years at a public university in Illinois that attracts manystudents from China (I’ve since transferred), and some of my Chineseclassmates arrived there with trouble communicating in English. As a result,they were poorly prepared for life in the United States and avoided talking to non-Chinese speakers at almost all cost.
This presents a perplexing question: If a Chinese student can barely talk,read, or write in English, how is she or he able to graduate from an Americancollege at all? The answer of course is complicated. But my experience inIllinois may shed some light on the situation. From what I’ve seen, someof my Chinese classmates are able to get good grades without actually beingable to speak English well.Let me offer some examples.
When a friend of mine, Tang, decided to come to the United States for college,his spoken English was unintelligible and his writing was full of grammaticalerrors. Tang was expert at cramming for exams. He took an SAT cram course andmemorized 300 words a day for three months (most of the vocabulary he has
since forgotten). Even though Tang didn’t feel his English had improvedmuch, he scored a staggering 2160 on the SAT.
Like many foreign students, Tang was required to take a composition course toimprove his English. Other Chinese students have survived college writing bycopying or paraphrasing essays their predecessors wrote. But Tang soon foundthat, for his class, resorting to plagiarism was not needed. When he turned inhis first essay, Tang expected it to be returned covered with red marks, orpossibly rejected. To his surprise, the instructor gave him an A-minus andsaid he could revise the draft for a better grade. Suspecting the instructor
hadn’t read his work at all, Tang turned in the exact same essay withthe word “Revised” scribbled on top. This time he received an A.
Perhaps it should not be a surprise that Tang’s instructor overlooked his deficiencies. After all, a one- or two-semester writing course can’tpossibly raise a student’s English ability from “crap (Tang’s description)” to college level. Aninstructor can either maintain standards and get students stuck in the classyear after year, or relent and give them the convenience of passing grades.
When I described this dilemma to my former reading and writing professor, hesaid instructors tended to choose the latter option because they knew “Chinese students have been spending a lot of money, and
Don’t want to waste any time on learning English.”
Outside of English instruction, for many of my Chinese classmates, Americancolleges’ introductory science classes were child’s play (alot of the material they learned in high school). The humanities were adifferent story. My Chinese peers tended to put off taking the reading- andwriting-intensive humanities courses until the final terms before graduation,when they suddenly realized they needed credits in philosophy or history tofulfill the college’s general-education requirements.
Xu, a Chinese mathematics major with a 3.8 GPA, told me his solution wassimple: Get the credits online. Last summer Xu signed up for an online courseon Latin American history. Taking the class online meant he didn’t haveto speak or listen to English at all because there weren’t anydiscussions or lectures.
But Xu still had to deal with the required reading. My Chinese friends like Xuhave gone a great distance to avoid reading English. Some find Chinese versionsof the texts and read the translation instead. Some make their own translationswith Google Translate. Others who don’t mind reading a little in Englishseek help from SparkNotes or Wikipedia. But Xu had a better idea. He clickedaway on a Chinese search engine for 10 minutes, and found the Chinese synopsesof the books online.
With that and a little imagination, he posted daily responses to the discussion forum, and finished the two essays the class required. He said hereceived an A.
Once my Chinese classmates got the general-education requirements out of theway, all that was left were classes in their majors. Many Chinese students atmy former university study the sciences, and their grades suggested they weredoing well. But as Xiao, a junior majoring in molecular and cellular biologytold me, earning a high GPA doesn’t always mean a student is actuallylearning.
“All I’ve done is rote memorizing,” he said. “As longas you know the equations and follow instructions, you can succeed in examswithout knowing what you’re doing at all.”
Having spent years cramming for exams in China, Xiao knew well what any examreally measures is how familiar one is with the exam itself. So before themidterms and finals, instead of reviewing lecture slides and readingtextbooks, as his American peers did, Xiao spent a whole night going throughevery past exam from 1997 to 200l.
Of course, not all Chinese students find studying in America unrewarding. I,for one, think coming to the United States for college was one of the betterdecisions I’ve ever made. But I also benefited from a different
educational path than most of my peers. Growing up in Shenzhen, a youngmetropolis 30 minutes north of Hong Kong, I have been learning English sincekindergarten. My parents, who were open-minded enough to let me argue withteachers, encouraged me to think for myself.�And my high school, which bucked
the norms of China’s education system by putting more emphasis onextracurricular activities, taught me there was more to learning than examsand grades.
And so when I came to America, in 2010, my English wasn’t bad and I wasdetermined to fit in. I made a point of speaking only English for a semester,even when talking to other Chinese students. I challenged myself by takingmostly humanities courses such as law, history, and literature. I evenexperimented with dance parties, beer pong, and Ultimate Frisbee.
Many of my Chinese peers, however, come from a more traditional background.Some don’t have the idealistic view of college as a place for personalgrowth and self-discovery. They often approach American colleges with theutilitarian mind-set that getting the highest grades is the only thing thatmatters. As a result, it’s not unusual for some of them to graduatewith impressive grades without having learned very much at all.
So as the number of Chinese students in the United States continues to grow, aword of caution to American colleges and universities: As my friends Tang, Xu,and Xiao have demonstrated, just because some Chinese students are gettinggood grades on paper doesn’t mean they are doing well in reality.
[Creative Commons Wikimedia graphic by Aris Katsaris authorized under the GNU General Public License]
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