“[The students] pegged it as being his language because he had an accent,” Maurer says.

BRIDGING CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

By seeking to improve the teaching skills of foreign TFs, the Bok Center course benefits both the graduate students—many of whom may later assume teaching posts—and their undergraduate students, Pollock says.

“That’s what I love about my job,” she says. “It’s a win-win for everyone.”

With the Bok Center course, Pi receives the undergraduate input she says is important for her to understand what College students expect in the classroom.

Forster—whose experience in Life Sci 1a provided some of the incentive to help out in the new course—meets weekly with each of his four graduate student partners to go over class work and engage them in general conversation.

He says that he has learned to identify the standard weak spots: vocabulary is not crucial, and he opts to focus on word stress and sentence fluency.

And like any rigorous teacher, Forster complains that his graduate students don’t practice enough outside of class.

“Every week, for some of them, is like starting new,” he says.

—Staff writer Noah S. Rayman can be reached at nrayman@fas.harvard.edu.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

CORRECTION: April 14, 2010

An earlier version of the Apr. 14 news article "Graduate Student Teaching Fellows Lost in Translation" incorrectly suggested that there is a total of 230 international students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In fact, the 230 figure refers to the approximate number of incoming international students each year.