Cross Cultural Contrasts: The International Student in the United.
States.
Introduction.
The United States of America attracts tens of thousands of students from all over the world. There are, approximately, 5,000 four-year colleges and 10,000 community colleges in the United States and almost all of them are playing host to students from all over the world. Students come to the US to study from national cultures as different to each other as that of Indonesia and Ireland, and as different to the American culture as those of the United Arab Emirates and Outer Mongolia. By way of example, consider the languages that can be heard on the campus of one of our local community colleges! Apart from English and Spanish, some of the languages that can be heard at Pepperdine University include Farsi (Iran), Russian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Indonesian, Thai, Tagalong (Philippines), French, Italian, Swedish, German, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, and Hindi. This means that the barrier of learning English so as to communicate with professors and fellow students is one of the first that the new international student must face. .
It is also true that the national cultures of the various foreign students who come to America to receive their higher education differ significantly with respect to educational values, educational practices, and educational standards. This is another way of saying that university life in such places as Japan, Italy, and Russia is a very different thing from what the foreign student will encounter in the United States. According to all reports university life in Japan is relatively relaxed. Japanese students work so hard to get into a university in the first place, that they do not really exert themselves excessively once they get there. In Italy, on the other hand, university life is intellectually exciting and politically challenging, but the entering student is not immediately overloaded with does not really have to worry about taking exams right away, since these come at the end of the process right at the beginning.
