Foreign students struggling with English
But some say there is pressure to pass them
Veteran college English instructors are routinely receiving passionate, imploring pleas for passing grades from the international students who increasingly fill their classes.
The foreign students’ emotion-filled emails and in-office appeals, often issued in jumbled English, invariably aim to cajole faculty at Langara College and other institutions into giving them a break, so they will be able to move on from their mandatory courses in English literature.
They often maintain their entire future depends on passing the English course.
Langara College has experienced a five-fold rise in foreign students since 2014, but two English literature and composition instructors say the college’s over-reliance on international fees is not working for many high-stressed foreign students, their anxious offshore parents or for shortchanged domestic students.
Langara College English instructors Peter Babiak and Anne Moriarty are among a small number of Canadian higher education officials who are raising concerns about the expanding business of international education, which now brings 130,000 foreign students to B.C., mostly Metro Vancouver.
“I do feel sorry for the (international) students, of course, but that’s not really the point. When I assign grades, presumably I need to be objective and not let emotions get in the way,” says Babiak, who has been teaching at Langara since 2002.
Like many faculty at universities and colleges, Babiak and Moriarty feel pressure to wave through the full-fee-paying foreign students, especially in mandatory first-year English literature courses, even if they lack fluency in English.
“There is a booming industry dedicated to helping students jump through English-language hoops, which teachers like me everywhere work hard to defend. Being part of this is weighing heavily on my conscience,” said Moriarty.
Langara provost Ian Humphreys, however, said Tuesday “there is no pressure on faculty to pass students who are not yet achieving learning outcomes.”
Moriarty, however, said that even though many of the foreign students work hard in their technical, business and computer courses, many also leave their mandatory English literature course to the end of their multiyear programs, knowing their English is weak.
Both Babiak and Moriarty also agonize over how classroom discussions in English literature courses are often severely restricted because of language barriers. It means, he said, students who seriously want to study novels, linguistics and composition don’t get as much high-level interaction as they could.
The number of international students at Langara College has increased almost five times in the past four years, to a total of 5,107 students (not including those in continuing education). In tandem with foreign-student recruitment efforts in India by former B.C. Liberal premier Christy Clark and Langara College administrators, the number of students at Langara from India has catapulted 40 times higher in just three years.
It’s jumped to 3,084 students from India in 2017, up from 68 in 2014.
Foreign students this academic year made up about 34 per cent of the 15,000 full- and part-time regular students at Langara College, compared to just 13 per cent three years ago.
The worries raised by Babiak and Moriarty echo those of Patrick Keeney, a B.C.-based education professor, who wrote in a Canadian faculty journal about increasing language obstacles in Canadian classrooms.
Since foreign students make up significant proportions of many Canadian classes and many struggle with English or French, Keeney said, he’s witnessed how both domestic students and foreign students are being shortchanged, especially those in the humanities and social sciences.
“How is that someone who has only rudimentary conversational English should now miraculously be expected to read, write about and speak substantially to scholarly texts? The answer is that many simply cannot,” says Keeney, who has taught at Thompson Rivers University, Simon Fraser University and Chiang Mai University in Thailand.
“Why,” adds Babiak, “should the material delivered in firstyear English (literature and composition) classes, and the writing demanded, be watered down because of the presence of ESL students? This would be like a student asking a geometry or algebra prof to overlook or ignore general weaknesses in spatial orientation or problems differentiating addition from multiplication functions.”
Even though it’s rarely discussed outside private faculty meetings, Babiak and Moriarty say many humanities colleagues fear if they fail foreign students, there will be repercussions.
Many faculty, they say, are anxious about getting poor rankings on “rate-your-professor” websites, not filling future classes with students, displeasing administrators (even if they are not directly told so) and having to spend many extra hours in their offices with distraught students.
Not every foreign student struggles with English at Langara, says Babiak.
The proportion changes from term to term. And some diligent students who initially get a D in his courses have worked hard and ended with Bs.
Even though Langara and other institutes of higher learning require most students to pass English-language tests, Moriarty and Babiak say those tests don’t always adequately measure if students have the language skills to do well in literature and humanities courses.
Moriarty and Babiak say many students are falling through the cracks in the province’s language assessment bureaucracy, including by skipping Langara’s test by transferring in from other colleges.
Langara’s provost, however, said there should be no problem with students’ language levels, since many students must take the “Langara English Test.”
The abilities of those who transfer in from other institutions should also not have an impact, Humphreys added, because “decisions about which courses are equivalent are made by the departments at each institution responsible for the subject matter.”
Despite disagreement between faculty and administrators, language difficulties in classrooms can create high stress for many people in B.C.’s colleges and universities.
One foreign student to whom Babiak gave a low mark in English literature complained to his department head, claiming Babiak was a “racist.” She eventually dropped out.
Babiak and Moriarty said they feel badly for foreign students and their parents who appear to have been told by recruiters that by paying five times more in fees than domestic students their offspring will not only get a Canadian education, but access to the Canadian job market and favoured treatment for future citizenship.
“I also feel sorry for the domestic students who take my courses and expect me, logically, to deliver an English education suitable to the first-year transfer level,” says Babiak, author of Garage Criticism: Cultural Missives in an Age of Distraction.
“My classes have, in the past couple of years, been radically transformed into ESL catchbasin classes.”
Moriarty is calling on higher education administrators, faculty and politicians to take on issues surrounding the foreign-student phenomenon in “a thorough, transparent and measured conversation” about educational values.
“The conversation would embrace multicultural classrooms as a healthy given, while not ignoring or denying whether they’re working for B.C. students of all ethnic backgrounds.”