Cultural reentry shock: using the professional writing class to help foreign students

Abstract

It is argued that foreign students, who spend four or more years studying at US universities, often do not realize how much their years in America have changed them. Nor do they realize that these changes will have a profound effect on them when they return to their native cultures. The difficulty they will have upon returning to their home countries has been called cultural reentry shock. The professional writing classroom seems a good place for educators to make foreign students aware of cultural reentry shock. Teachers can define the various problems associate with this phenomenon, lead students in discussion of the problems, and propose ways to ease the severity of the problems. Writing assignments may be structured in such a way as to allow students to do self analysis of the changes they may have undergone during their years in the US. The students can be encouraged to design their technical documents using their native environments as the source of data, examples, and issues to write about. These documents can also be written for an audience in the native culture, rather than to an American audience. >