Last fall, the Bok Center began a pilot program called “Oral Communications Skills Course For International TFs.”

Yundan Pi admits that she was not prepared for her duties as a teaching fellow.

Pi, a third-year graduate student in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, served as a teaching fellow for an advanced course in her department last spring, but she says she did not feel completely comfortable communicating with her students.

“Sometimes, I just didn’t do well,” Pi says, adding that she often had trouble responding to her students’ questions. “I was so nervous.”

Pi, who has lived in America for seven years, has had to acclimate herself to the American classroom after experiencing a very different pedagogical environment in China. She had not been prepared to see students eat in the classroom, and she was unfamiliar with the concept of extracurricular commitments.

So when the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning extended a pilot pedagogy course this spring targeted at graduate students who are non-native English speakers, Pi says she pounced on the “wonderful opportunity.”

Since 2007, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences has expanded its collaboration with the Bok Center—which focuses on undergraduate teaching—on a series of initiatives that seek to combat the language barrier between TFs and students in the classroom.

Last fall, the Bok Center began a pilot program called “Oral Communications Skills Course For International TFs.” The students—who hail predominantly from East Asia and study the physical sciences—are joined by two undergraduates in a unique environment that exposes the graduate students to American culture and the Harvard classroom.

THE LANGUAGE BARRIER

William N. Forster ’13, one of the undergraduates who assist the non-native speakers in the new course, recalls his foreign Life Science 1a teaching fellow’s struggle with communicating the basic concepts of biology.

“It made it not worth going to class,” Forster says.

Nearly one third of all students at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences are foreign. Each year, there are around 230 incoming international students, and not all of them can speak perfect English. But most of them are requested to lead a section for an undergraduate course by their second or third year in school, according to GSAS Dean for Student Affairs Garth O. McCavana.

The Bok Center has offered pedagogy courses for graduate student instructors since its establishment in 1975. Departments that offer similar courses for their own graduate students will often collaborate with the center, says Bok Center Associate Director Virginia Maurer.

But until 2007, there existed no standard method of screening the language skills of foreign TFs. Departments used their own methods of preparing section leaders, ranging from courses that count for credit to a simple day-long workshop at the Bok Center, according to Assistant Dean of the College Logan S. McCarty.

“Graduate students would be asked to teach who may not have had the language skills needed to be successful in the classroom,” McCarty says. “And that doesn’t benefit anyone.”

In 2007, a GSAS committee’s recommendations ordered that all non-native English speaking graduate students be screened for competency in reading and speaking English—whether they anticipated teaching undergraduates or not.