Cultural Attitudes to Learning

Also in Japanese culture (and education) the emphasis on training seems to be on intuition rather than logical construction of argument. This made it much harder for me to explain what I want to say in essays or in tutorials.(Japanese MA student)

One problem was getting used to the system where a student is expected to find out for her/himself the requirements and facilities of the University. This contrasts with the system at home whereby a person, generally the lecturer/supervisor, is responsible to the needs of the student ... Also logical approaches are different. For example, in order to answer a question by a straight yes/no, there is a tendency to

Go around the point (circumlocution) which probably stems from the influence of the home language.(Indian PhD student)

 Another way of understanding the problems a student from another culture may face in moving to a Western university system is to consider the case of an Indonesian postgraduate student who was writing her thesis on Indonesian literature. Her first attempt at writing the opening chapters of her thesis was severely criticized by her supervisor because it was `merely descriptive'. In the first chap­ter the student had recounted the personal life of the author she was studying.

Her next chapter consisted of a detailed summary, with long quotations, of a short story he had written. The next chapter was a summary of a novel, and so on. Her supervisor complained: ‘This work is not up to the level of senior high school students. It is disastrous for a student at postgraduate level.' Yet, as the student explained, her approach to literary criticism was exactly the style used in her own country and the tradition in which she had been trained.

The Job of the literary critic, she explained, is to make the l ife and works of an author available and understandable to a wider public; the way to do this is to summarize the author's writings.Once this student began to read critical articles written by Western literary critics, she could recognize that her approach must change. Gradually she developed the capacity- and the courage- to question, to analyse and to develop critical views about the works of her author. And her thesis was successful. Looking back on this slow process of change she commented: ‘Now I am beginning to see what I must do. I am learning how to ask questions. And which questions to ask. Before I didn't even know there were any ques­tions at all, did I?'

student must learn

these learning styles

Indonesian postgraduate student