Weichen Li
EAP 507- DP2
Instructor: Doetsch-Kidder, Sharon; Hibbert, Anneli
Date: June 1, 2016
Analytical summary for de Araujo (2011)
Adjustment Issues of International Students Enrolled in American Colleges and Universities: A Review of the Literature written by Abrahao Andre, de Araujo (College of Education, Nursing, and Health Professions, University of Hartford) was published in Higher Education Studies, June 2011, Vol. 1, No. 1. In this article, de Araujo (2011) reviewed the literature on adjustment issues of international students studying and living in the United States. In this process, de Araujo（2011）found out that there existed a deficiency in the previous research: not many attempts to synthesize the relevant literature. In addition, the tough situation of international students in the U.S motivated de Araujo (2011) to write this paper. Therefore, in order to bring existing literature together and figure out what the adjustment issues of international students studying in American colleges and universities, de Araujo (2011) integrated previous findings and reviewed this literature.
Throughout the whole review of literature, de Araujo (2011) summarized six major adjustment issues of international students enrolled in American colleges: “English language proficiency, social support, length of stay in the U.S., perceived discrimination or prejudice, establishing relationships with Americans, and homesickness” (P.1.). The authors believed that this literature review could contribute to those who are devoted to offering international students support and designing programs to help these college students to adjust American educational context.
Focused Analysis of Homesickness
Homesickness was an important key concept in this article. This concept was not defined in the article because de Araujo (2011) firmly believed that his target audience, who are highly educated practitioners in colleges, could easily understand this basic concept. Instead, he preferred to describe homesick issue by using a key term “levels of homesickness”. Therefore, de Araujo (2011) could use this key term to quantify the homesick degrees of students in different races. By referring to Poyrazli and Lopez’s (2007) study, de Araujo (2011) successfully draw a conclusion that international students have higher levels of homesickness than native students, because higher “levels of discrimination” meant international students might have higher “level of homesickness”. After de Araujo (2011) introduced this key term, he could compare the homesick degrees between Indian students and native students.
In addition, de Araujo (2011) cited some other sources to further explain the key concept homesickness. For example, the authors cited the research result from
Focused Analysis of a Language Pattern
In this article, de Araujo (2011) used many noun phrases to expand and clarify the basic key concepts and add to the meaning of these key concepts in his article. For example, in the part of Findings from literature review, as de Araujo (2011) analyzed the issue of students’ homesickness, he used a number of noun phrases with adjectives, prepositions and other modifiers. These noun phrases basically included the key concept homesickness, such as levels of homesickness among sojourners and domestic students (a prepositional phrase in a long noun phrase), incidence and determinants of homesickness (a prepositional phrase), significantly higher levels of homesickness (an adjective phrase and a prepositional phrase), and A notable relationship of homesickness (an adjective phrase and a prepositional phrase).
Most interestingly, as he talked about the issue of international students’ homesickness, de Araujo (2011) did not use a large number of complicated words to integrate previous finding. He just created noun phrases to expand this key concept. Therefore, in academic writing, authors generally use noun phrases to clarify key concepts and use modifiers to limit, expand or describe these key concepts. By analyzing the rhetorical element, key concepts and language patterns of this article, I deeply understand how to define the project of the writer in my own terms and figure out the functions of different phrases in an article. That is also what Harris (2006) wanted us to learn in his article “coming to terms”.
References
Abrahao Andre& de Araujo. (2011). Adjustment issues of international students enrolled in American colleges and universities: A review of the literature. Higher Education Studies, 1(1), June 2011.