Difficulties I face as an international student

I just graduated from the high school when I first landed here in the United States. It’s been four months now and I’ve had some wonderful and tough experiences that I will remember throughout my life. Trying to fit in a totally different culture, food and languange is never an easy thing, and the most difficult thing for me to overcome is the language barrier.

While we are required to take TOEFL and SAT exams to prove a certain level of English fluency, the language barrier may still pose a problem across all contexts. When I first came here, I found that assignments that involve strong English language skills or abstract writing abilities was really a tough challenge for me. I had never written this kind of paper in my high school, so I was not familiar with the structure of paper at all as well as the resources citations — the foundation of a successful essay. And sometimes, it could be very frustrating and overwhelming to fully understand the concept but be unable to express it satisfactorily in English or argue my opinions with strong reasons. I was so struggling with the academic writing that it took me the whole quarter to get command of writing skills by visiting writing services and review the ppt about recourses citation or reporting verbs posed by the teacher on the internet.

Besides, language fluency is an issue that makes discussion in classes difficult. When I was in China, the spoon-feed educational style is common from the elementary school to the high school, so I just got used to sit on my own chair and listening to the lecture for the whole class. However, after I came here, I found that I need to change the study habit. The most time of a class is devoted to discussing, sharing ideas and putting up queations. Honestly speaking, it is still hard to get a full point on class participation. When I take Western Civilization history sections this quarter, I let many accounted questions which actually I know the answer slide, because before I have organized my answers well into English, the native speaker have already stolen my thunder. And sometimes, reading massive ancient document is suffering, since as a foreigner, it requires me to learn about the background information to fully understand why this document were written or how the ordiance were formatted. And I have to look up to the dictionary frequently for many old-English words which is exceedingly time-consuming and annoying.

It’s the first step that costs. Actually, I am very confident that I can solve these difficulties once I gradually get used to American education approach and overcome the language barrier.