EXPLORING, READING AND WRITING SCIENTIFIC

LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

THE NON-NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS’ PERSPECTIVE

Adriana Popescu, Princeton University

ASEE 2008, Pittsburgh

Do you ever hit the hay or hit the ceiling?

Horse around or smell a rat?

Pay through the nose or stick your neck out?

“If you understand every word in a text and still fail to grasp what the text is all about, chances are you are having trouble with the idioms”.

Adam Makkai, PhD.Professor of Linguistics

University of Illinois at Chicago

In a nutshell…

• Many expressions and words remain unfamiliar for non-native speakers

• Library terminology is still mysterious– 11% of international students don’t know

what a Reference Librarian does and 17.1% of

international students don’t know what

Interlibrary Loan is. Yan Liao, Mary Finn, and Jun Lu,

“Information-Seeking Behavior of International Graduate Students vs.

American Graduate Students: A User Study at Virginia Tech 2005”,

College & Research Libraries 68, no. 1 (Jan. 2007): 5-25.

By the hundreds (2006-2007)• International undergrads - 9.2% (442)

• International grads - 38.6 % (896)• Engineering grad enrollment - 21.7%• International grad enrollment in

Engineering - 55%• The largest concentration of

international students:1. Electrical engineering2. Economics 3. Chemistry

Information Fluency and International Students at Princeton

University Library: The Bottom Line

• Reach a solid level of knowledge of services and collections

• Efficient use of the research collections

• Draw on the expertise of the subject librarians and bibliographers

We are all in the same boat

Frustrations on all sides• Engineering faculty

(Advisors)• International students

Can we help each other?• The Writing Program• School of Engineering (SEAS)• The LibraryWriting in Sciences and

Engineering (WSE) courses…

You don’t need to be an Engineer to learn about Engineering

• Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education created in 2005– Mission: prepare all students, engineers and

non-engineers “to be leaders in an increasingly complex, technology driven society”

• New courses– “Engineering in the Modern World”– “Reading and Writing About the Scientific

Literature in English” WSE-1 (6 weeks)– “Writing an Effective Scientific Research

Article” WSE-2 (6 weeks)

2006: WSE is making an entrance

Course Goals• Increase participants’ experience with writing in

English

• Deepen understanding of scientific writing• Develop strategies for collaborating in writing• Write critically and effectively about scientific

articles in area of research

International doctoral students in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Physics, Molecular Biology, Materials Science – varies each semester (max. 12)

WSE-1 “Reading and Writing About the Scientific Literature in English”

Course Topics• Week 1: What additional

resources are needed to develop as effective scientific writers?

• Week 2: What makes for a quality paper in your field? (discuss readings, library research survey)

• Week 3: Where does your field conduct its business? (library instruction)

• Week 4: How do you identify a good problem in your field?

• Week 5: How do you develop a line of argument?

• Week 6: How do you revise effectively?

Course format

• Weekly reading assignments, followed by writing assignments

• Informal writings are posted to a message board

• Writings express students’ reactions and thoughts about the writing style and about the content

• Formal writing: ~1500 word review of the scientific literature in each participant’s field of study

Engineering Library’s Involvement: Training the Trainer

Course Topics & Syllabus • Humanities vs. Engineering

– Organization and structure of engineering information– Publishing and scholarly communication trends– Reading lists– Plagiarism (examples speak volumes)

• Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices, Council of Writing Program Administrators

http://www.wpacouncil.org• Academic Integrity at Princeton: A Guide to Campus

Resources http://www.princeton.edu/writing/integrity

And they spoke…straight from the shoulder

Week 1: assigned readings

Diane Belcher, “The Apprenticeship Approach to Advanced Academic Literacy: Graduate Students and Their Mentors,” English for Specific Purposes 13, no. 1 (1994): 23-34.

Yu Ren Dong, “Non-native Graduate Students’ Thesis/Dissertation Writing in Science: Self-reports by Students and Their Advisors from Two US Institutions,” English for Specific Purposes 17, no. 4 (1998): 369-390. Week 2: discussions + survey

Week 2: In their own words…

Students agreed with the findings of the studies done by Belcher (1994) and Dong (1998):

– International students tend to take less advantage of the resources available to them such as the library, labs, and other social networks and they are less likely to ask for help or be open about their needs with their advisors or peers, unless they belonged to the same cultural group.

– It is much easier for domestic students to take advantage of these resources because they are so familiar with this education system.

Week 2: In their own words… (continued)

– For international students, these resources might be totally new and even if they would know about them, they hesitate to try using them because of fear that it will not be done “in the right way”.

– International students have more limited social networks than domestic students and their information sources tend to be found by communicating with fellow students in their home countries.

– Significant difference between the social experiences of students from Asian countries and those from European countries, in the sense that students from Europe don’t share the same feeling of isolation as their colleagues from Asia and they tend to create larger social networks than Asian students.

How much do international engineering grad students know

about library research? Very little…

• Week 2: After

discussions, the survey– Results reviewed and

discussed with writing faculty

– Library session planned to

address results of survey and

be specific to students’

research

Straight from the horse’s mouth…

• How do you keep current with what is new in your field?– Paper that my advisor forwards to me, search on

internet if I have some problems with my experiment, check web once in awhile to look at the new papers.

– Conferences, Google, Web of Science.

– Look at the major conferences in the field.

– Get info from my professor, people whom we collaborate with, friends working in the same field, conferences, etc.

– Lab mates, advisor.

– I will Google first with the topic and some key words related to my interest. Web of Science is the best choice, since it’s very poor in key word searching.

– Google Book/Scholar. Library.

Straight from the horse’s mouth… (part 2)

• You have just found a citation to a paper that looks interesting; describe the process you would follow to get a copy of that paper.– Google Scholar!

– Google the source of that citation. See if the source has an online database. If not, try searching through the library’s collections

– Google it so far all papers I needed were available for free so I didn’t have to use any special Princeton benefit account

– First, search it on Google. Second, if it’s downloadable, download it. If not, try some special like IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library. If still not, then go to the library to find a hard copy

– Hook up the title on Google, or go the library database

Week 3: You think you know the LIBRARY?

“Where does your field conduct its business?”

• Unique group dynamic

• Support the goal of the course

• Task oriented, specific tools

• Practicalities: news from the homeland, job hunting and interviewing

• Regular individual consultations continued for WSE-2

In the end…

• Cultural and language differences will remain an important factor in the process of adjusting to the North American educational system – Thin dividing line between isolation and alienation– Internationals seek primary help from their co-nationals when their

spoken English proficiency is limited, and only approach academic support systems when their English competence and self confidence is higher

• Clear role for mediation services of various kinds– Effective discussions need to be conducted in a supportive

environment!

• Research skills and effective use of informational resources are valued

Bibliography• Mary Beth Allen, “International Students in Academic Libraries: a User

Survey,” College & Research Libraries 54 (July 1993):323-333. • Diane Belcher, “The Apprenticeship Approach to Advanced Academic

Literacy: Graduate Students and Their Mentors,” English for Specific Purposes 13, no. 1 (1994): 23-34

• Yu Ren Dong, “Non-native Graduate Students’ Thesis/Dissertation Writing in Science: Self-reports by Students and Their Advisors from Two US Institutions,” English for Specific Purposes 17, no. 4 (1998): 369-390..

• Yan Liao, Mary Finn, and Jun Lu, “Information-Seeking Behavior of International Graduate Students vs. American Graduate Students: A User Study at Virginia Tech 2005”, College & Research Libraries 68, no. 1 (Jan. 2007): 5-25.

• Nancy Moeckel and Jenny Presnell, “Recognizing, Understanding, and Responding: A Program Model of Library Instruction Services for International Students,” Reference Librarian no.51-52 (1995):309-325.

• Kwasi Sarkodie-Mensah, “In the Words of a Foreigner,” Research Strategies 4 (Winter 1986): 30-31.

• C.-I., Sung, Investigating rounded academic success: the influence of English language proficiency, academic performance, and socio-academic interaction for Taiwanese doctoral students in the United States (2000). Unpublished PhD dissertation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan.