elt j-2015-hirano-178-87

© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.

‘I read, I don’t understand’: refugees coping with academic reading

Eliana Hirano

This article investigates the experience of seven refugee students with academic reading during their first year of college, with a focus on the challenges they faced completing assigned readings and the strategies they used to cope with these challenges. Although the participants graduated from American high schools, they were not considered ‘college-ready’, according to their scores in standardized exams. Data were collected over two semesters through interviews with participants and faculty, class observations, and written documents such as assigned readings. Data analysis followed qualitative procedures. Findings show that all seven participants were able to cope with academic reading in first-year college, despite the numerous difficulties they faced. This article has implications for college instructors teaching not only refugee students but also teaching any of the growing number of international students currently attending higher education worldwide.

This article investigates the experience of refugee students with academic reading during their first year at a liberal arts college. Their experience with academic writing is reported elsewhere (Hirano 2014). With varying degrees of interrupted education, these refugees graduated from American high schools, but were not considered ‘college-ready’ according to their scores in the standardized exams which are often considered for university admissions. A refugee is defined as a person who is outside his or her country of nationality and is unable to return to that country because of a well-founded fear of persecution. Refugees are resettled worldwide, with the United States being the world’s top resettlement country, having resettled approximately three million refugees since 1975.

The educational experience refugees go through in their country of resettlement has only recently started to attract attention. Even though Rumbaut and Ima’s (1988) report on the educational attainment of refugee students in California was published 25 years ago, it has only been in the last ten years that this population started to be the focus of more research in education, especially in school settings and in family

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Introduction

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literacy contexts (for example Perry 2008; Roy 2008). The experience of refugees in tertiary settings, however, still remains ‘virtually unexplored’ (Dryden-Peterson and Giles 2010). The Canadian journal Refuge is an exception, with a special issue on international concerns surrounding access to and policy in higher education for refugees.

The dearth of research exploring refugees in higher education may be explained by the small number of refugees that pursue education at that level. According to Ferede (2010), for example, refugees are the least represented newcomer group in higher education in Canada. Because going to college poses such a challenge to this population, it becomes even more important to understand how refugee students cope with college-level academic reading despite their histories of disrupted or interrupted formal education.

In this study, academic reading is viewed within the framework of academic literacy as a sociocultural practice (Gee 1996; Street 1999). To clarify, from this perspective, neither reading nor writing is viewed as a skill that is independent from the social context in which it occurs. Rather, literacy is conceptualized as a social practice that is necessarily intertwined with different contextual factors such as purpose, audience, and text. Within this framework, a student whose reading level is considered low for college purposes, as measured by a standardized exam, may still be able to deal successfully with college-level academic reading because of the use of coping strategies. Reading in real life is not necessarily done in isolation but, rather, constitutes a sociocultural activity.

Drawing from a larger study,1 this investigation explores the challenges a group of refugee students faced with academic reading across the disciplines in their first year of college as well as the strategies they developed and used to overcome these difficulties.

In order to explore the experience of refugee students with academic reading, a qualitative year-long multiple-case study (Duff 2008) was carried out. This study took place at Hope College,2 a small private liberal arts college in the United States. For the 2009–2010 academic year, Hope College admitted seven refugee students even though they were not considered ‘college ready’ by traditional measures used in admissions such as scores in standardized exams.

Four of the focal participants (Arezo, Kayhan, Tabasum, and Sabrina) were from Afghanistan and the remaining three (Yar Zar, Solange, and Musa) were from Burma, Rwanda, and Liberia, respectively. They were four women and three men, and at the beginning of the study their ages ranged from 18 to 21. They had lived in the United States for an average of five years, ranging from two-and-a-half to seven. In the process of being resettled, their education was interrupted from almost zero to five years. They all graduated from high school.

This study also included 13 faculty participants who were teaching the classes taken by the focal participants (see Table 1 for an overview of some of the courses taken). The professors that were invited to

Methodology

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participate taught classes that the focal participants perceived as challenging in terms of reading and/or writing. They had different levels of experience at Hope College ranging from adjunct to full professors; most of the professors were at the associate or full professor ranking.

This study used interviews, observations, and written documents to collect data. Each focal participant was interviewed eight times, following semi-structured guidelines (Merriam 1998) that focused on the readings students were assigned, the challenges they faced, and the strategies they used to cope with the texts. Interviews lasted an average of 55 minutes, ranging from 30 to 90 minutes.

Faculty participants were interviewed once in the second half of the semester. They were asked about the reading assignments required in their courses and their perceptions of how the focal participants dealt with these requirements. Faculty interviews followed classroom observations and lasted an average of 50 minutes, ranging from 30 to 97 minutes. Between focal and faculty participants, there were 69 interviews in total, which were all audiotaped and transcribed in full.

Throughout the two semesters of data collection, different types of documents were collected including course syllabi, reading material discussed in the observed classes, and reading material participants found particularly difficult.

Data analysis was ongoing, recursive, inductive, and data driven (Taylor and Bogdan 1998; Duff 2008). Data were first analysed through open coding, in which I looked for ‘anything pertinent to the research question or problem, also bearing in mind that new insights and observations that are not derived from the research question or literature review may be important’ (Mackey and Gass 2005: 241). As analysis progressed, I examined the data to identify emergent patterns and themes.

The reading practices the participants engaged in during their first year of college were motivated almost exclusively by required course reading assignments that came from textbooks, compilations of primary source

table 1A summary of courses taken by the student participants

Course title* Yar Zar Arezo Kayhan Tabasum Sabrina Solange Musa

Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

√ √ √

First-year Seminar √ √ √ √ √ √ √Principles of Economics I √ √ √ √ √Contemporary World Issues √ √ √American National Government √ √ √Introduction to Psychology √ √World Religions √Theatre Appreciation √ √ √

Note: *the students took many more courses besides these but due to limited space they cannot all be listed here

Data collection

Data analysis

Academic reading challenges

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material, and from a few journal articles. They were sometimes also required to read ethnographic accounts or biographies. The different reading challenges identified in the data are discussed below.

As first-year students, the difficulties they encountered with reading sometimes did not stem from the assigned readings themselves but from the very different ways reading is dealt with in high school and college. According to the students, in high school, reading was often done in the classroom and, even when it was assigned as homework, students seemed to understand the assignment more as a suggestion. As Kayhan put it, teachers would ‘still give you a chance’ if you had not done your reading at home and let you do it in the classroom. Or, as Yar Zar explained, even if you had not done the reading, if you just listened to the lecture on the following day and took notes, you could ‘get by’. In college, on the other hand, as Yar Zar stated, ‘you actually have to read’. Arezo, moreover, explained that college professors often did not remind students of when reading assignments were due, which made her feel that, in college, ‘you’re on your own’. Furthermore, because college professors often did not ask whether students had done the assigned readings, Kayhan felt that, ‘In college, if you didn’t read it, no one really cares’. Thus, although students were sometimes able to ‘get by’ without reading in college, the lack of class reading time meant that higher levels of autonomy were required.

Another major difference between high school and college reading practices, as identified by the participants, regarded what students were expected to do with what they read, especially in exams. They all did very poorly in their first exam in college because they expected to be asked questions requiring them to simply recite knowledge memorized from books, such as definitions of terms. In Kayhan’s words, ‘In college, […] they want you to know not the basic answer, but to apply that answer’ (Interview 1). To illustrate, a question from the exam he was referring to read ‘Define exegesis and explain the relevance of the term with regard to Neihardt’s book’.

The participants were unanimous in saying that the amount of reading they were expected to do for some of their classes was beyond that which they could handle comfortably; this was often a cause of stress. Tabasum said, for example, ‘Whenever I have time, I do my reading, […], but there’s not enough time to read for all of them’ (Interview 6). Their struggle often seemed warranted. For their Introduction to Cultural Anthropology and World Religions courses, for example, they were sometimes expected to read 120 pages in a week. Considering the other classes they were taking and the fact that they were all working an average of 15 hours per week as part of their scholarship, it is not difficult to understand why they felt under pressure trying to complete these assigned readings.

All seven participants had learnt English as their second or third written language and were still in the process of developing their English literacy when they began college. They would, therefore, sometimes get frustrated with the difficulties they faced in understanding what they were reading. Whenever a participant mentioned a difficulty

Amount of required reading

College reading is different from high school reading

Language issues


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understanding a text, if they could identify the origin of the problem, they pointed to vocabulary as the main culprit.

Some of the courses presented participants with more reading challenges originating from language than others. Two such courses were Theatre Appreciation and American National Government. The origin of the difficulty in both of these classes was related to the fact that students were required to read texts in their original form. Kayhan, for example, mentioned that reading Shakespeare plays in ‘old English’ (Interview 5) was very difficult. Similarly, those participants taking the American National Government class often struggled with the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century materials.

The role of insufficient background knowledge affecting reading comprehension became the most evident in two government classes. In particular, it affected Solange in the American Government class, and Sabrina and Arezo in their Contemporary World Issues class.

Most, if not all, of the reading assignments in the American Government class were stand-alone pieces of writing such as the ‘Gettysburg Address’.3 Solange found that reading these texts was very hard, but she managed to cope, assisted by the professor’s lectures that provided the historical and political backdrop against which the reading could be understood.

Without the professor’s explanations, however, lack of background knowledge sometimes prevented Solange from fully appreciating a text. A point in case was when she was required to read and write an essay on Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I have a dream’ speech.4 Solange mentioned several times that this was a very difficult paper to write, and much of her difficulty seemed to stem from the fact that she was not familiar with the history surrounding the speech, and that the professor did not discuss it in class. She said, ‘That’s the thing. We had to read it on your own’ (Interview 6). Her paper showed her perhaps naive reading of the speech when she wrote, for example, ‘[MLK] found a way of stating the obvious without offending anybody or taking the side of any race’. Thinking about this assignment retrospectively, the government professor realized that ESL students may have an extra layer of difficulty when tackling it. He said:

It just never crossed my mind that I needed to say in class that […] King is making the speech in the era of segregation. This is so matter-of-fact that it just escapes notice that you’d need to point out to somebody that segregation, institutionalized discrimination, is taking place in America.

The other course that required a lot of background knowledge to understand the assigned readings was the Contemporary World Issues class. Arezo, Sabrina, and Yar Zar took it; however, unlike Arezo and Sabrina, who had a very difficult time in this class, Yar Zar thrived in it. Having chosen International Relations as his major, the issues discussed in this class were consistent with his interests. Arezo and Sabrina, on the other hand, constantly struggled in that class. Arezo’s comment summarizes how they felt about this class most of the time:

Insufficient background knowledge

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For my Government class, we had to read two articles that’s like 10 to 15 pages long and two of them each day and like I read the article, it’s like I read, I don’t understand, I can read, but I don’t understand what’s going on. (Interview 1)

All the assigned readings for the Contemporary World Issues class were articles taken from journals such as Foreign Affairs and Current History. Students were typically assigned one to two articles per 50-minute class. The professor was aware of the importance of background knowledge to understand these texts and tried to provide it in his lectures. Despite this, however, what he taught in class was probably still beyond Sabrina and Arezo in terms of their understanding of these issues.

As discussed above, the seven participants faced various reading challenges in their first year of college. Most of the time, however, they were quite adept at developing strategies to help them cope with these challenges, and these are discussed below.

All the participants, at some point during this study, claimed they were not doing the assigned readings before class but were instead relying on lectures and the occasional accompanying PowerPoint slides to learn what they were supposed to. They used this strategy for different reasons. At the beginning of the spring semester, for example, many of the participants mentioned that they perceived the lectures as mere repetition of the textbook and were waiting to see how they did in the first exam of each discipline to decide how important it was to do the assigned reading. This strategy did not result in good grades and most participants started reading more subsequently. A second reason was the perception that the lecture conflicted with the textbook and that the professor gave precedence to his or her exposition in class. A third reason for not doing the assigned reading before class was because the reading was too complex, as was the case with Kayhan when he was learning about neurons and the brain in Psychology. Solange, in her American National Government class, sometimes did the same. Lastly, participants sometimes did not complete their reading assignments for sheer lack of time. Tabasum, for example, said that ‘There’s not enough time to read for all of [the classes]’ and, in choosing what not to read, she would leave her least favourite class (for example Economics) until last.

Reading selectively All the participants used the strategy of reading selectively in order to cope with too much or difficult reading. Participants used this strategy extensively.

SkimmingParticipants used this reading strategy quite deliberately, especially before going to class, often with the intention of reading the text again after class, or before the exam. Some of the professors condoned the use of this strategy. As Solange’s American National Government

Strategies developed and used to cope with reading challenges

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professor said, ‘There’s […] nothing wrong […] with skimming the material, especially if you’re having a hard time understanding it’.

Reading according to PowerPoint slidesSeveral of the professors the participants had in their first year did not make use of PowerPoint slides. However, in most classes where this technology was used consistently, it tended to acquire more prominence than just assisting the delivery of a lecture. Sabrina explained her rationale for using this strategy: ‘instead of reading the five pages which […] don’t have to do anything with it, we read the paragraph that she’s talking about [on the PowerPoint]’ (Interview 6).

Reading according to study guidesProfessors often provided materials that highlighted the key concepts and ideas for a specific section of the course (for example handouts, study guides, review sheets). The students made extensive use of these materials, often to the point of not knowing what to read or study if they were not given one. Yar Zar, for example, said, ‘Before the exam, I go to the study guide. The study guide makes you read the book. Like, you look at the study guide, you read the book’ (Interview 6). Likewise, Solange explained, ‘In Anthropology, she gives us … [a] review sheet whereby you have questions that guide your reading’ (Interview 4). In the same vein, Musa stated, ‘I look at the question [in the review sheet] and just read a lot on that stuff, on the topic’ (Interview 4).

Enhancing the reading experience

As the participants struggled with reading in their first year of college, as well as not doing the reading assignments or doing them selectively, another strategy they often used was to enhance their reading experience by finding different ways of improving the quality of their reading, as shown below.

Finding moments and places conducive to better readingIn an attempt to find ways to be more productive when reading, several of the participants started going to the library, where they could find a quiet space, instead of staying in their dorms, where there was always so much distraction. As Solange mentioned, ‘I don’t want to be in my room a lot, cause every time I’m in my room I just sleep or I watch TV’ (Interview 5). Likewise, after failing her first three exams in Contemporary World Issues, Arezo decided not to do the assigned readings in her room, especially before going to bed.

Reading with a peerSeveral of the participants relied on peers to aid their comprehension of course material. Some of the participants did the assigned reading itself in groups, sharing their understanding of the text as they went along. Others mentioned getting together with peers to study and clarify points they were not clear about.

Using a dictionaryAs discussed above in the ‘Reading challenges’ section, all the participants mentioned, at one point or another, having some reading

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difficulty related to unknown vocabulary. It is therefore interesting to see that using a dictionary was generally not a very popular strategy, at least as reflected in the data collected.

Of the participants who reported using a dictionary, only Tabasum and Musa mentioned having a hard copy and using it regularly. Tabasum said, ‘If I don’t use [a] dictionary then I don’t understand […] I have a paper dictionary I usually carry with me’ (Interview 2). The other participants used online dictionaries occasionally.

Rereading after lecturesWhen the Contemporary World Issues professor suggested to Arezo and Sabrina that they should reread the articles when they could not understand them, they did not think his advice was helpful and felt frustrated. As it turned out, both of them ended up going back to the articles after the lectures and found the practice to be useful.

This was not, understandably, a common practice among the participants. Most of the reading strategies they used involved trying to find ways of cutting back on the time they needed to accomplish reading assignments and not the other way around. Just to illustrate, when asked if he ever reread the plays he had struggled with in his Theatre Appreciation class, Kayhan replied, ‘No, you’ve got to be kidding me, no way’ (Interview 6).

Tutor-supported readingAt Hope College, tutors for the different courses are available to students who request them. Most of the participants made use of this resource to help them with reading assignments they had difficulty with. At one point, for example, Arezo was meeting with her tutor for the Contemporary World Issues class twice a week, every week. Yar Zar, at the end of the spring semester, reported having a tutor for almost every class. Tabasum, similarly, reported requesting and meeting with tutors for almost all of her classes.

Seeking out assistance from professors

Most of the participants in this study, when they felt they were struggling with content, took the initiative to seek their professors’ help. These interactions did not seem to focus exclusively on the reading assignments students were asked to do, but more generally on the combination of reading assignments and class lectures. Most of the time, when participants sought their professors’ help, they seemed to have a specific question about the course content that they wanted to ask. If they had a more global difficulty with the class, however, they tended to consult tutors instead. Tabasum clarified this point in Extract 1 below:

Extract 1: taken from Interview 8

(T = Tabasum; R = Researcher)

T: I went to talk with [the Economics professor] before I took the exam because […] I had question.


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R: Was it the first time that you went to talk to this professor?

T: Yeah, […] because before, I didn’t understand, I didn’t know what to ask.

Likewise, Sabrina explained that she had not looked for the Contemporary World Issues professor outside class because ‘For his class I don’t even know what to ask him. This is like the biggest thing, I don’t know what to ask him’ (Interview 1).

Conclusion and implications

The challenges these seven refugee students faced as they tried to cope with academic reading across the disciplines in their first year of college corroborate, in many ways, findings from previous studies that have investigated the experience of students who start college while still in the process of learning English (for example Harklau 2001; Crosby 2009).

Despite these reading challenges, however, all seven participants were proactive in finding strategies to cope. By not doing all the assigned readings, reading selectively, enhancing their reading experience, and seeking help from their professors, these students were able to manage the reading assignments they were expected to do. How much of the content in these reading assignments they actually grasped is beyond the scope of this study. The fact that all the participants completed all of the courses they took in their first year successfully, and later graduated from college, is a strong indication that they managed to navigate the academic reading practices in college.

The challenges and strategies described above are undoubtedly particular to these seven students in a specific college, as analysed by this one researcher. In this respect, it is not possible to establish any generalizations. Even among the participants in this study, there were differences. Studying with peers, for example, was very popular with most of them, but not so much with Solange or Tabasum. Yet, these strategies can be interpreted as different possibilities that might help not only refugee students but any student facing similar difficulties with academic reading in college.

The major contribution made by this study, therefore, lies in the description of the strategies used by the participants. The supportive atmosphere provided by their college enabled them to develop these strategies and succeed. Small classes, a teaching-oriented faculty, a residential campus, the cohort of seven refugee students, and having tutors available are all factors that facilitated the development of the coping strategies discussed above. Other institutions of higher education, however, may not be able to provide the same level of support and, as a result, students struggling with reading might have trouble developing coping strategies by themselves and may, as a consequence, fail courses they find challenging in terms of reading.

Professors and instructors in different institutions of higher education can help ease students’ experience with academic reading by being aware of the types of challenges they may face and by encouraging the use of some of the strategies that the participants in this study found useful. College professors, for example, play an important role in mediating the

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reading challenge experienced by students. For one, they can provide students with additional information when the content they teach requires background information that is unlikely to be available to a student. EAP instructors, in turn, can encourage students to use different ways of enhancing their reading experience and can raise students’ awareness of the benefits of interacting with professors during office hours whereas instructors of first-year seminars can explore the different expectations regarding reading in high school and in college. Overall, these seven cases, collectively, make the point that students who are not considered ‘college-ready’ may still be able to cope with academic reading in college.

Final version received September 2014

Notes1 The focus of the larger study was on academic

writing and reading. The main findings pertaining to academic writing can be found in Hirano (2014).

2 All names (institution and student) are pseudonyms.

3 ‘The Gettysburg Address’ refers to a speech given by US President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 during the American Civil War. It is considered one of the most important speeches in American history.

4 Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I have a dream . . .’ speech was delivered in 1963, and it is considered a defining moment of the American Civil Rights movement.

ReferencesCrosby, C. 2009. ‘Academic reading and writing difficulties and strategic knowledge of Generation 1.5 learners’ in M. Roberge, M. Siegal, and L. Harklau (eds.). Generation 1.5 in College Composition: Teaching Academic Writing to U.S.-educated learners of ESL. New York, NY: Routledge.Dryden-Peterson, S. and W. Giles. 2010. ‘Introduction: higher education for refugees’. Refuge 27/2: 3–9.Duff, P. A. 2008. Case Study Research in Applied Linguistics. New York, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum.Ferede, M. K. 2010. ‘Structural factors associated with higher education access for first-generation refugees in Canada: an agenda for research’. Refuge 27/2: 79–88.Gee, J. P. 1996. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses (second edition). London: Taylor & Francis.Harklau, L. 2001. ‘From high school to college: student perspectives on literacy practices’. Journal of Literacy Research 33/1: 33–70.

Hirano, E. 2014. ‘Refugees in first-year college: academic writing challenges and resources’. Journal of Second Language Writing 23/1: 37–52.Mackey, A. and S. M. Gass. 2005. Second Language Research: Methodology and Design. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Merriam, S. B. 1998. Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications in Education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.Perry, K. H. 2008. ‘From storytelling to writing: transforming literacy practices among Sudanese refugees’. Journal of Literacy Research 40/3: 317–58.Roy, L. 2008. ‘Language and literacy practices: Somali Bantu refugee students and families in a predominantly Latino school and community’. Unpublished PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at San Antonio, USA.Rumbaut, R. G. and K. Ima. 1988. The adaptation of Southeast Asian refugee youth: a comparative study. Final Report to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Washington, DC: US Office of Refugee Resettlement.Street, B. V. 1999. ‘The meanings of literacy’ in D. A. Wagner, R. L. Venezky, and B. V. Street (eds.). Literacy: An International Handbook. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Taylor, S. J. and R. Bogdan. 1998. Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods: A Guidebook and Resource (third edition). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The authorEliana Hirano is Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at Berry College, Georgia, USA. She holds a doctorate in Applied Linguistics from Georgia State University. Her research interests include academic literacies, second language reading and writing, and immigrant and refugee students.Email: [email protected]


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