As a special event, the Faculty Caf\u00e9 held on November 18 welcomed Sandra Silberstein, professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington (UW), who lectured on UW\u2019s academic support for international students. This event was opened to faculty and administrative staff members outside of Waseda, hoping to share Professor Silberstein\u2019s excellence on supporting international students in the classroom.<\/p>\n
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Sandra Silberstein, professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington<\/p><\/div>\n
In the opening remarks, Koichi Suga, senior executive vice president and director of CHES, expressed his anticipation for the lecture, saying, \u201cWaseda University was selected in the highest category of universities to receive funding from a multi-million government program called the Top Global University Project. We have been making efforts to create a more global academic\/research environment, for instance, by establishing 7 undergraduate and 14 graduate programs taught entirely in English<\/a>. I hope that we can all learn from Professor Silberstein today to receive hints about how to improve teaching at Waseda and the student\u2019s learning experience.\u201d<\/p>\n Silberstein had served as director of the MATESOL Program at UW for 35 years. Since 2008, she has led large-scale surveys on the faculty, teaching assistant (TA), and international student experience of what it is like to be at an increasingly globalized institution. In this lecture, she shared her findings based on these surveys and introduced the kind of academic support UW has implemented.<\/p>\n According to her findings, many UW faculty and TAs agreed that there are benefits to teaching international students. \u201cInternational students bring new perspectives to issues discussed in class which invite students (and instructors) to rethink what they have often taken for granted,\u201d she quoted a survey participant.<\/p>\n On the other hand, Silberstein pointed out that UW faculty and TAs have also expressed the challenges they face in the surveys. For example, they are not sure whether international students generally have lower in-class participation because they do not feel confident in their English proficiency, they are not used to a learning environment which encourages class participation, or they just lack willingness to participate. Others include the lack of awareness towards plagiarism and the question of to what extent should a faculty\/TA be correcting grammatical errors by international students when assessing writing assignments.<\/p>\n\n\t\t