Foreign graduate students at Ohio University “are spending up to two hours a day learning how to speak so that their American colleagues and students will understand them,†Richard Perez-Pena wrote in The New York Times.
“It is a complaint familiar to millions of alumni of research universities: the master's or doctoral candidate from overseas, employed as a teaching assistant, whose accent is too thick for undergraduate students to penetrate,†he wrote. “And it is an issue that many universities are addressing more seriously, using a better set of tools, than in years past.â€
At American universities, one in every six graduate students hail s from another country - about 300,000 of them, almost half from China and India, according to the Institute of International Education. In science and technology fields, foreigners make up nearly half of the graduate students.
Those from China and other East Asian countries are often like Xingbo Liu, a graduate student in nutrition here, who said she had taken English classes nearly all her life. “But we only learn how to write and read,†she said, “how to choose the right answer on a written test.†Many Indian or African students have done most of their formal education in English and are comfortable speaking it, but with accents that challenge American ears.
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