Marlon Meng 12/05/2024
Dear UC Davis Faculty,
I really appreciate your dedication and contribution to building a great learning environment for the students who study at UC Davis.
As a multilingual student at UC Davis, I have benefited greatly from your support for my academic studies. The resources of my courses helped me to make progress and to learn better. For example, my writing course professor provided powerpoints to introduce the roles of connections, which helped me to write papers better. While UC Davis offers excellent resources, there are challenges that many multilingual students face. I hope to bring these issues to your attention and offer potential solutions.
Once when I was doing my Chemistry quiz, there were some words that I never understood before, such as “Sediment,” “Lethality,” and also some verbs. I felt so anxious and I could not give the correct answers at that time because of my weak English language proficiency, rather than because I really did not know the correlative chemical knowledge. This led me to misunderstand the meaning of options and to lose marks on the simple questions. As a result, this personal experience highlights a common issue for multilingual students at UC Davis: the difficulty of learning in a non-native language.
My personal experience is also somewhat related to what Faiza Ahmad observed during her time as a bilingual student. Ahmad shares an experience in her open letter, A Letter to Multilingual Students (2019). Once in a biology lecture, Ahmad noticed a fellow student using Google Translate to understand the terms, and switching repeatedly between her notes and translations. This moment made her realize the additional hurdles multilingual students face in mastering academic materials, balancing both language comprehension and course content.
As a suggestion, you can supply glossaries of technical terms like “Sediment” and “Lethality” alongside their definitions and examples during lectures or in course materials. Moreover, you are encouraged to set study groups that could pair multilingual and native English-speaking students together to promote mutual learning and support. This can be feasible in the small class. If you have large-style lectures, you can encourage your teaching assistants to do this in their discussion sections.
Besides, most multilingual students at UC Davis tend to be less active in attending office hours, which are important opportunities for academic support and networking with professors. Many of my classmates from different countries, such as China, Indonesia and Korea, have shared with me that they rarely participated in your office hours. They told me that they felt afraid of language barriers, thought that they might not express their questions clearly or might struggle to understand the professors’ explanations. Others argue that one-on-one discussions with professors are not common in their homelands. In addition, some of them worried about asking “easy” questions. They thought that it might make the professor think they are not paying attention in class.
This lack of engagement with your office hours can put multilingual students at a disadvantage, as they miss out on deeper understanding of course materials, and opportunities to build networking relationships with you. Robert Farrington’s article, 5 Tips For College Freshman To Help Maximize Year One (2021), explains that students can find professors and ask if they can stop by professors’ offices or laboratories and learn more about what they do. This advice is more helpful to multilingual students, because most of them do not participate in office hours actively, in contrast with domestic students. If multilingual students go to professors’ office hours regularly and provide their ideas about studies, they may impress the professors. After that, they may be able to get some opportunities to network with professors, such as getting a qualification to participate in a professor’s research project, or receiving an invitation to attend an academic event with a professor. This illustrates the importance of multilingual students meeting with professors outside of lecture hours. Overcoming these barriers requires both multilingual students and UC Davis Faculty to actively address this issue. Actually, I would appreciate it if you could encourage more multilingual students to participate in office hours.
For instance, my writing course professor often encouraged my classmates and I to go to her office hours. If someone misses her office hours, she will also tell the student to feel free to make an appointment for online office hours. This motivated my classmates and I a lot to attend her office hours and to get help with my papers. However, one of my professors often adjusted his office hours, which made it impossible for me to arrange my time well to participate in his office hours. I really hope this situation can be improved. Therefore, maintaining a fixed office hours time is the prerequisite for multilingual students to go there actively.
During your office hours of the first week, you can decorate your office to welcome them. As advice, you can ask each multilingual student where they are from, and then stick the national flags of those countries on the walls of your office as a surprise for them. After that, you can communicate with the multilingual students about themselves. For example, asking questions about their hometowns, or sympathizing with them about learning in a different language and cultural environment. While professors show their concerns about them, this promotes a closer networking relationship between you and multilingual students. They would be motivated to study industriously in your class and to attend actively to your office hours.
In conclusion, multilingual students at UC Davis need more attention and help in some areas where they are disadvantaged: they need additional support for learning in an English environment and encouragement to attend office hours. Your continued efforts to support students are greatly appreciated, and I hope these suggestions contribute to a more equitable learning environment.
Yours faithfully,
Marlon Meng
References:
Faiza Ahmad. 2019. A Letter To Multilingual Students. The Cornell Daily Sun. Cornell University. From:
https://knight.as.cornell.edu/news/letter-multilingual-students
Robert Farrington. 2021. 5 Tips For College Freshman To Help Maximize Year One. Forbes. From:
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