Challenges Experienced by International Nursing Students Essay

Introduction

Students coming into a new environment face challenges that hinder their adjustment. The need to belong is one of the most fundamental issues. However, the need is not always met when the student is not only new, but also comes from a different cultural background. Telbis, Helgeson & Kingsbury (2014) suggest that international students struggle with acceptance in a new school. Inadequate social support and discrimination further aggravates the situation for international students. These circumstances bring about feelings of isolation, loneliness, and alienation (Telbis, Helgeson & Kingsbury, 2014). Given that it is hard enough for international students to be away from home and from their loved ones, they would benefit from some support from the fellow students and the faculty. However, the support is not always available, a factor that increases the level of homesickness (Baba & Hosoda, 2014). According to Baba and Hosoda (2014) learning in that kind of environment is usually problematic and negatively affects students' performance because these students already have increased demands of the schoolwork and higher expectations from their instructors besides the language issues and homesickness.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Fear and Anxiety in the Learning of a Foreign Language

The current standards of the Ministry of Education in UK and US aim to develop communication skills as a priority, which implies that students must face oral practices such as conversations, roll plays, support in different topics, or talk about their daily life among others. They make use of the foreign language, situations that develop various levels of anxiety and stress, especially when the grammatical structures, vocabulary and idiomatic expressions of English are not mastered, as one would wish. However, according to the theories of Gardner and Smythe, anxiety should decrease as the level is advanced.

The teaching of English in UK has been standardized with the European Common Core which classifies the levels of language proficiency taking into account the linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic competence. As students' progress in knowledge and language proficiency, they move up from A1 (beginner) to C2 (expert). School anxiety over learning a foreign language originates from three major sources. These are the fear of communicating in another language, fear of negative evaluation by others and anxiety about exams (Schmidt & Frota, 2015). According to this study, anxiety and fear diminish as communication skills develop in the foreign language, but this is not always the case. Difficult experiences such as humiliation, abandonment, aggression among others, especially when they occur in childhood or youth, can generate permanent traumas in the individual, depending on the features of their personality.

Reinders and Pegrum (2015) have described how anxiety can arise; A student, in his early stages of learning, could encounter many difficulties, ranging from the inability to acquire an adequate pronunciation of the foreign language to the difficulty to grasp the grammar rules. If these first experiences make the student nervous and, in addition, he/she feels uncomfortable when making mistakes, the so-called "situation anxiety" develops, that is, a particular situation can trigger high levels of anxiety, such as talking in public. When this happens repeatedly, the student begins to associate the activation of anxiety ("anxiety arousal") with the foreign language and with its learning. These investigations show that a student, even if he has the necessary cognitive skills, can block the learning of a foreign language. This is due to the anxiety that this process produces the fear of grades, not expressing himself well, the mockery, investing a lot of time in the study and getting few results can cause the student to conclude that he is not good at language learning even when the causes may be anxiety and frustration that have been experienced.

Stress

Stress is another problem for many of the international students. Khawaja, Chan, & Stein (2017) investigated some of the stressors that are unique to the learning environment of a foreign country. The study was founded on the experience of the international students in the United States (Khawaja, Chan, & Stein, 2017). Language and communication was one group of stressors that the researchers identified. This study revealed that international nursing students lacked self-confidence because they could not communicate well within and outside the classroom (Khawaja, Chan, & Stein, 2017). They experienced challenges expressing themselves verbally or in written English and they felt as if others considered them inferior because of their language deficiency.

Homesickness and Academic Achievement

Homesickness affects the overall outcome of a student. Baba & Hosoda (2014) define homesickness as "the distress or impairment caused by an actual or anticipated separation from home" (p. 415). Homesickness is the cognitive impact of being attached to and missing home and significant others. Depression and anxiety are among the indicators of homesickness. Students who move to a different country are more likely suffer from these effects. During post-secondary education, many students spend long periods of time away from home; however, this separation is worse for the international students because they may be away from home for years at a time, while domestic student may be able to get home more often (Baba & Hosoda, 2014). While the experience could be an adventure for some international students, for others it can cause social and intellectual distress.

The impact of homesickness on the achievement of the student depends on the extent of the problem. Those who experience it at a mild level tend to develop coping mechanisms that motivate them to develop positive attachment tendencies (Baba & Hosoda, 2014). However, the problem can be so intense that it negatively affects the learning process and students' overall level of achievement. International students may experience self-doubt that impedes their learning. Their academic and social lives are negatively affected by the impact on the self-concepts (Baba & Hosoda, 2014). The problem is worst during the first year of their learning because of the transition (Baba & Hosoda, 2014). If international students are able to develop positive coping behaviors that mediate the effects of homesickness, they can adjust to their new environment with time and perform better in the following years. Students can do this by dealing with their self-perspective, a concept that is explained below.

Self-Perspective

Barkhuizen (2015) mentions many of the desirable characteristics of the motivated student by describing him as the student who directs his own learning. He/She is referred to as a student who is responsible and is aware of his/her learning objectives. This student self-evaluates and therefore he/she is aware of h...