Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Internship Narrative Draft2 2
Internship Narrative Draft2 2
Internship Narrative Draft2 2
What will happen when an international student from China work for the first time in
an institution of the US and work with people who come from almost everywhere in
the world? People might expect a lot of cultural conflicts or cultural differences in this
situation. As the observer and the participant in this case, I indeed witness various
with my American colleagues and the immigrant participants also remind me how
The immigrant students, my American colleagues, and me, the three parties, at first
seem quite different from each other in their identities and positions in the American
society. However, the three parties also share a lot of similarities in their
communicative repertoires.
Therefore, the repertoire I share with my colleagues would be based in our similar
On the other hand, like the immigrants who are new-comers to the US culture, I also
am new to this culture, and desire to learn a lot about it. My great interest in the
Civics Class demonstrates this. Therefore, when talking about the new and unknown
American culture, the immigrant students and I share curiosity in common, as well as
The American staff and the immigrants also share repertoire which I call social
(for example, paying taxes, parking, child care, mortgage). Therefore, I could
from both my American colleagues and immigrant students about the life outside the
academic repertoire.
identities, positions, cultural background etc among the immigrant students, the
American staff and me. In this narrative, I will draw on my own observations during
my internship at the Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians, from three different
refugees served by the Welcoming Center, and the Centers US staff. The specific
examples presented in this internship narrative mainly deal with the cross-cultural
observations are drawn from my daily work experiences at the Center and are closely
related to my responsibilities.
Immigrant Language Acquisition, Wilson (2012) pointed out that Philadelphia is one
of the nine cities in the US providing language access services for immigrants.
Among my American staff, there are several ways for addressing the immigrants in
the main three options when the staff are talking about immigrants. Most of my
immigrants achieve the goals of helping immigrants settling down in the US. For most
of the ESL class teachers, they prefer using immigrant students to refer to the
immigrants. From my point of view, clients are rarely used could show WCNP s
can find many similarities in the academic settings where I have been involved in for
a lot of years. At the very beginning of my internship, I found a great many shared
Like immigrant participants who are new-comers to the US culture, I also new to this
culture and desire to learn a lot about it. My great interest in the Civic Class could be
a demonstration for this. Therefore, when talking about the new and unknown
American culture, immigrants and me always share the curious feelings, as well as the
willingness that desire to learn about foreign cultures. In addition, I am not only a
new-comer into a culture but also a new-comer into a new social setting. Working as a
volunteer at WCNP is different from being a student at school even though the two
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settings share a lot of similar features.
calls to people who register for the WCNP to schedule appointments with them. After
this initial contact, the immigrant participants would bring their documents to the
center and the in-take instructor will input all general personal information into the
with immigrants by asking them questions about their conditions of education, family,
finances, living etc and finally their ultimate goal coming to the center. The database
is designed as the archive of all the immigrants who register for the center so that they
might get help according to their conditions and their employment status would also
be traced by using the contact information recorded in this database after they leave
the center.
I still remember how nervous I was when my in-take instructor checked with another
volunteer I worked with about my performance for my first independent in-take work.
of immigrants in Philadelphia, and the office culture in the US. Before I worked as an
intern in this organization I did not have any other working experience in the US and
most of my interactions with people from non-Chinese culture happened within the
I was lucky enough to participate the staff meetings every Wednesdays. The purpose
of the staff meetings was to put forward issues that currently emerge in the
organization so that the staff would come up with possible solutions to the issues. Or
sometimes visiting guests from other organizations would be invited to give lectures
during the staff meeting. One of the guest lectures which made a strong impression on
provides people with free advice on getting safe medical care and legal services in
medical related law suits. The speaker began his lecture with a series of appalling
were all shocked by the fact that in the US a large number of people die every year
because of the careless medical treatment. Especially for me, before I came to the US
my perceptions of the medical care system of America was that it is quite advanced, in
other words, large numbers of medical accidents are impossible in the US. However,
the fact is that in the US, the medical care system has its own issues and medical
article written by Nenner (2009) I read about. The story reports a case in which a
hospitals carelessly dealt with an immigrant from China whose nose kept on bleeding
after he was assaulted in the course of a robbery: he refused to be discharged from the
hospital. In the article, the writer looks in details at reasons for the Chinese
suspected him of being an undocumented immigrant. In any case, he did not recover
from the injuries. The guest lecture revealed problems in the medical care system for
average American citizens, and showed that the situation might be even worse for
immigrants.
Many immigrants come to the US because they have to if they want to survive. A lot
of immigrants own countries are currently war-zones and the basic safety of people
could not be guaranteed in their own countries. For many such immigrants, the US
represents a place of hope where they might be able to live in relative safety.
However, if immigrants could not get basic services like necessary medical services
either here because of their immigrant identities, that will bring a great many hardship
to immigrants and they will trap into dilemma of being unable to survive both back
The first thing I spent some time on to adjust myself was the ways of addressing my
environment at the Center, everybody addressed each other by using the first name. I
struggled a little to get used to that because in Chinese culture and in the academic
context, I rarely address people who are elder than me by using their first names,
Another new awareness I got from my internship experiences was the importance of
checking the work schedule first each day before starting work. I found that such
schedules are quite important in the US office culture at least in the Welcoming
Center. People were expected to check all the schedules or shared calendars before
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they take actions. There was a time when I double-scheduled the office room due to
Besides those new notions about office culture, I also learned a lot from the Civics
Class. The Civics Class was meant to prepare immigrants for their Citizenship
Application Test. Therefore, a lot of information about American history, politics, and
details of US history and politics (this, for example, was the first time I learned what a
phone bank was). In this class I gained many insights into life in the US, and
learned about street skills, which might be rarely discussed in formal, academic
environments.
newcomer to integrate and get insights into a new culture. This in fact is
Second Language Experience (Dudley 2007). The researchers used interviews and
their social integration. The research results show that most of the immigrants have
different ways of using oral English to communicate and for most of the immigrants,
interviewees reported that they could practice both productive and receptive English
during interactions with native speakers. Other immigrants who engaged in volunteer
Also, most of the interviewees reported that volunteering enabled them to have more
intensive contact with local people, which helped them integrate into the target
culture. These reports from the research were also proved by my own working
experiences in the Welcoming Center. I not only met people from all around the
world, but also learned the American culture through daily encounters with my
American colleagues, and learned more about current issues, histories, and electoral
In the Welcoming Center, immigrants definitely have a lot of opportunities to use their
English such as asking their case managers for help, chatting with their classmates
from other countries in English or visiting the English-language websites to look for
I believe if immigrants could also have the opportunities to work as I do, they would
classroom assistant and as an intake assistant; I also worked with the case manager
team.This allowed me to become involved in most of the work the organization does,
and gave me the chance to observe my American colleagues who work in different
my observations of the US staff are mainly about their efforts to communicate with
The first thing I noticed when I started doing in-take was the box of tissues on the
office desk. My first thought was that it was for the staff use, but later I learned from
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our case managers that the tissue were actually for immigrant clients. By and by, I
learned the necessity of the tissue when immigrant participants came to do the intake
and talked about the hardship and struggles in their previous life or the wars in their
mother countries. There were a lot of times people could not hold back tears.
The staff in the Welcoming Center also help immigrant participants with their English
learning outside the ESL classroom. Sometimes when it was the break time, some
staff would chat with the immigrant students in English, partly in order to informally
assess their English speaking proficiency. There was a time when an immigrant
participant pointed at the kitchen and said chicken instead. One of the case
managers corrected the student but then began to use chicken to refer to the kitchen
area every time when talking to the same immigrant student, and by and by nearly all
the staff began to adopt to the funny mistake. When looking at these examples, I
really appreciate how the staff at the Welcoming Center make efforts to create a
friendly environment for the immigrants even when they made mistakes in using
ESL Classes
ESL classes are the main source of my observations. In the ESL 0-1 class, most of the
immigrant students were beginners, which meant that most of them might only
understand English alphabets or simple greetings or words. The content that the
outside classes, the Welcoming Center also provide students with various levels of
In the ESL 0-1 class, the teacher did not simply teach English grammar, but also
taught knowledge that is related to US culture. For example, once when the teacher
taught English words about colors, he pointed out for the students the two different
ways of spelling gray/grey.. The teacher told the students that grey is more
common in British English and there are a lot of other English words that are spelled
Although this is just one tiny thing in the teaching, I think it already shows the
students variations in English usage, and puts these variations in a broad cultural
context.
Another example I observed illustrates that how the ESL class teacher is regarded as
the model or sample of the American culture by the immigrant students. The teacher I
worked with was originally from New York City, and I noticed that when he said the
phrase kind of to express uncertainty, he usually slightly stretched out his hand and
fingers and shook his hand a little bit. I do not know whether the gesture is specific to
New Yorkers or not, but I did notice that the immigrant students in the class,
especially some active Spanish speakers, gradually adopted this gesture, as did
another Arabic-speaking student later in the semester. Once, when she was asked to
express uncertainty and she forgot to say kind of, she just used the gesture to
express her meanings and the teacher quickly got her intentions and spoke out kind
of ? to reassure his guessing. I also noticed that in this class this body language was
even used to express the other meanings like I am not sure, I have no idea in
the students saw their teacher as a model of the target culture to imitate, and the
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articulations of the body language even gains new meanings when adopted by
element is, the more highly diverse the interactions with it will be (p.10). The
ambiguity of the meanings of the gesture and the widely use in this class could
. Observations of immigrants
English Learning
The main goal of most of the immigrant students in the ESL classes was to improve
their English so that they might have more opportunities in the new society. Once, an
immigrant from South Korea asked me how she might improve her oral English. Her
question made me realize that as a matter of fact, a lot of immigrants do not have
chances to speak English outside the ESL classes. One reason is that many a
immigrants do not have current jobs and their relatives or friends who speak their
mother tongue are the only people they have interactions with. Another reason is that,
even though they do have jobs, they still do not have that many opportunities to use
English when their jobs do not require them to use English often. ESL teachers, from
One approach I learned from one of my colleagues at the Welcoming Center is to ask
students to report in class about their conversations with others in English. The ESL
teacher often asked students to describe the situation of the conversations, with whom
they have conversations, how they feel about that, and what language problems they
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encountered in conversations. This approach reminds me of another article I read.
Stewart (2010) proposed a new pedagogy for L2 writing class that involved asking
immigrant students to write about their own feelings and experiences after coming to
the US. My colleague used the same strategy, which helps to integrate immigrants
daily experiences into their English leaning. Of course, ideally immigrants need to
practice their oral English in interactions with people in their jobs but this oral
outside the classes and to some extent, this assignment connects English pragmatic
Interactions among immigrants were the main ways that they learned about each
There were moments in the ESL classroom when Spanish-speaking students and
English. When they found the similarities in the forms of certain words, they would
happily use limited English to express the feelings of belonging to similar cultures.
One activity that immigrant students particularly enjoyed was in the ESL class is
when the teacher asked what the corresponding vocabulary for an English word in
other languages. It seemed to me that immigrant students were all amused by the great
My observations about the students interactions during the break time show how the
more frequent, and it seemed to me that perfect understanding or speaking every word
exactly was not necessary for successful communication to take place. As long as both
of the speakers knew the ongoing context and the purpose of the conversation, the
minimal use of language, as, for example, when a shared YouTube video might
All these observations once again make me feel the importance of communicative
repertoire and metacommentary as method, Rymes (2014) puts forward the concepts
communities in which they participate. Examples stated above could well illustrate
how gestures and body language served as one communicative repertoire help the
individuals communicate with each other. On one hand, these examples reminded me
that when it comes to language education, it is necessary for the educators to instruct
students to recognize the candidate repertoire elements and then explicitly explain
these elements within the given context. On the other hand, as an individual, I realized
once again that how abundant are the communicative repertoires people from different
cultures use during daily interactions. And these daily encounters provided me
communications.
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During my internship, I helped with covering the whole ESL classes twice due to the
absence of the instructors. Those experiences were my very first teaching and through
the interactions with my immigrant students, I for the first time realized how I
teaching, the most difficult thing I notice is communicating with immigrant students
during the teaching. The students I taught are from ESL 0-1 class so I made special
efforts to make myself understood when giving the instructions. Because of the
limited English level of the students, I had a hard time telling whether my students
understand my instructions and the contents I taught or not. The most direct way for
me to know was asking explicitly Any questions? or Does that make sense? As
the class proceeded, I noticed that students got bored with responding to these
questions. I was worried at that time because I did not receive the expected feedback
from my students so I had no idea whether they were on the same page with me. Also,
the reasons for students reducing interest in responding could be students were
getting bored because the contents are too easy for them or students were getting
confused because of the great amount information imposed on them. I could not tell
which reason it was when I was teaching. Only after I finished my class and I was told
by the students that the contents were rather easy that I realized that boredom was one
Now again when I reflect on my teaching, I think it might be because the position I
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have during the class time is the teacher thus immigrant students even got bored, they
would not explicitly tell me the contents do not fit. However, after the class, they
perceive me more like a volunteer who the teacher-student relations are not
salient.This makes me think of what methods I will take in the future teaching to
I am teaching. For example, one method that I can use to encourage students give me
my own own teaching materials. By using these methods, it might help me to pull my
identify of a teacher, which in many students perspective is formal and serious, a little
backward. Students might be more willing to share their actual feelings or feedback
when they think their comments will not threaten the teachers position during the
class time. Also, during my teaching I had some moments that I felt I am not qualified
to teach because I am not a native speaker and students seem to not fully trust in my
In Chens (2014) article, the writer examines moments of her own negotiations as an
where faculty of color are few. Using her own teaching as a case study, Chen critically
reflects on how her identity as a non-native speaker affects her teaching. This article
reinforces what I was experiencing when I taught in the Welcoming Center and it also
makes me rethink my identity as an ESL educator: what can I draw from my non-
native speaker identity in teaching? How could I get over my lack of confidence in
Intercultural Communication. New Directions For Teaching And Learning. 138. pp. 5-
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Dudley, L. (2007). Integrating Volunteering into the Adult Immigrant Second Language
Holmes, P., (2015). The cultural staff around how to talk to people: immigrants intercultural
Stewart, M. A. (2010). Writing With Power, Sharing Their Immigrant Stories: Adult ESOL
Students Find Their Voices Through Writing. TESOL Journal. 1(2). pp.269-83
Wilson, C.E., (2012). Collaboration of Nonprofit Organization with Local Government for
962-84
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