yuko’s story
DESCRIPTION
Yuko’s Story. Spack studied the integration of ‘Yuko’ over 3 years as she adapted to the needs of an American university Yuko had a TOEFL score of 640 (more than IELTS 7.0), which is higher than the entry requirements for virtually every UK university - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
Yuko’s Story
• Spack studied the integration of ‘Yuko’ over 3 years as she adapted to the needs of an American university
• Yuko had a TOEFL score of 640 (more than IELTS 7.0), which is higher than the entry requirements for virtually every UK university
• She had also spent one year at an American high school as an exchange student
• She was determined to succeed and was attracted by American educational methods
Yuko’s Story
• In her first year she did not complete some courses and had several difficulties, for example:
– she was not able to read quickly enough
– was unused to writing long assignments
– had little experience of independent learning
• In discussion groups she was intimidated by native-speakers, took a long time to formulate her contributions
• She partly attributed her difficulties to a lack of background knowledge in areas such as American history
Yuko’s Story
• In the second year she developed better survival strategies:
– faster ‘reading for gist’ techniques
– skipping passages
• She was still at times overwhelmed by both the amount and the complexity of readings – particularly when they were argumentative rather than factual
• She felt less guilty when deciding not to study every section of every course
• Criticised herself when her strategies avoided being critical – which she identified as the American way of learning
Yuko’s Story
• In the third year her confidence developed
• She collaborated better with other students
• Was selective in her reading
• Was more confident to be critical of readings
• Noticed that the other students sometimes did not understand
• ‘I used to open some reading and the printed words used to scare me and that doesn’t happen anymore’
Yuko’s Story
According to Spack Yuko let go of four myths:
• Good students grasp meaning the first time they read
• Good students understand every word of every reading assignment
• Good students read everything assigned
• Good students read everything on schedule