The Difficulties Due to Different Cultural Values

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ESL 21B Songlin Li In-class Essay 1- Revised version 3/21/2013 The Difficulties Due to Different Cultural Values Every year a large number of international students come to the Unites States to achieve higher education. Especially in Santa Monica College, international students are the very large group of the total number of students. For those students who want to complete their academic goals in the U.S. are not easy tasks duos to different cultural values between countries. Without exception Chinese students also have to conquer many difficulties in order to be more successful not only in studying, but the cultural adaptation. Students from China who study at SMC have difficulties as a result of differing cultural values of individualism, informality, and directness. The first difficulty that Chinese students need to face is as result of different values about individualism. Americans tend to be individual in many ways, even in teaching and learning. There is a strong individual characteristic that most Chinese students can feel. Most professors at SMC like to assign tasks to students before explaining them, and giving the chance to students to develop their critical thinking, analytical, and problem-solving skills. This fosters their independent spirit and makes them more individualistic. Like Gary Althen mentions in “American Value and Assumptions”, Americans train their children to make decisions in order to cultivate individualism when they are very young. (Page 5) They expect their children to be more independent, unlike teachers in China who teach from the textbooks directly and tell students uniform answers. As a result, many Chinese students have greater difficulties to deal the issue alone because the different cultural value of individualism. Secondly, informality is difficult for Chinese

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