Story By: Justin Janorschke
Many students are familiar with Missouri Western’s international student community. However, many students don’t know what many of them go through when they arrive in the United States.
While Western welcomes them with open arms, sometimes this is not the case with the rest of the local populace. To address this, Western’s International Student Services decided to hold a panel where students from around the world shared their struggles in learning a new language and moving to a new place for education. Titled “A Day with an Accent,” it was part of an upcoming series of discussion panels.
Deir Montiel, an International Studies major who helped set up the panel, explained that the ISS tries to help international students get to Western and provide assistance to them during their stay in America.
“We put events up like this specifically to educate the community around us,” Montiel said. “I think there’s a new generation wanting to be able to understand different cultures and new languages, so in that sense we put these programs on to be able to communicate with … domestic students.”
The panel of international students talked about issues dealing with their accents, answering prepared questions, but also including questions asked by the audience.
Javier Paz, a bio-manufacturing and engineering student from Honduras whose native language is Spanish, helped illustrate one of the biggest challenges he faced when learning English.
“My biggest challenge was trying to pronounce certain vowels,” Paz said. “Things like ‘rubber’ and ‘robber’ sound the same to me. The phonetics of the language was the biggest trouble.”
Paz stated that even though he has spoken English for many years now, he has still not completely overcome that obstacle.
“I’m making progress … mostly by adding context to my sentences,” Paz said. “Instead of just saying ‘rubber,’ I’m saying ‘a ball made of rubber.’ That’s a way to do it.”
Many of the other students shared similar stories, some of which included being discriminated against back in their home countries for speaking in an American accent. Others spoke of not having an adequate vocabulary when they first arrived, which made some conversations difficult.
Overall, attendance was fairly good and students were generally pleased with the panel’s discussion.
Ashley Tidwell, a junior who recently transferred to Western, explained what she thought of the event.
“I liked [the event] because I like to learn about different countries and how people see America, especially international students,” Tidwell said. “I didn’t know that most of the countries require them to learn English.”
The event was successful in showing students what international students face when coming to the U.S. Even though they come from all walks of life, the struggles they face are universal.