Yao Cheng

Dr. P.J. Moore

EAP 506 P01

Feb. 14th, 2017

Position Paper Revision

Under few circumstances can people deny that most of the international students usually make

great efforts to adapt new life abroad. It seems that, compared to the domestic students,

international students are generally satisfied with their academic success, while most of the time,

they tend to be less satisfied with their cross-culture social intercourses ( Council for

International Education, 2006; Schweizter, Morson, & Mather, 2011; Glass & Westmont, 2014).

Obviously, particitating in courses or other academic activities is the primary way for

international students to get involved in the brand-new social interaction. As a result, chances are

that international students could have enormous sense of belongingness through engaging in

inclusive curricula. According to Glass & Westmont (2014), contrary to their third hypothesis of

the study, although participation in inclusive curricula has an equally poitive direct effect on

cross-culture interaction for both the two groups of students, there is no relationship between

engagement in inclusive curricula and sense of belongingness for both the international students

and domestic student groups. However, after analyzing the results cautiously and refering to own

actual experiences, people may easily find that the third hypothesis of the article, which showed

that engagement in inclusive curricula possesses positive effect on sense of belongingness for

international students, should be supported validly.

First of all, the data from this study did not perfectly support the relevant result and discussion

part of this article. From the collected data, Glass & Westmont (2014) illustrated, Engagement
in inclusive currilcula exerted an equally positve direct effect on cross-culture interaction for

both the international student (=0.32, p<.000) and domestic student (=0.34, p<.000) groups

respectively; however, acdemic engagement in inclusive curricula exerted no significant direct

effect on academic success (p.114). In the first half part of this sentence, the authors showed

visual data from the study in Table 5, thus, the result about the effect applied by inclusive

curricula on cross-cultural interaction can be easily deduced. Nevertheless, the problem is from

the second part of this sentence. All the summarized parameters from Table 5 are calculated from

the data from Table 3, but the Table 5 never showed the calculated parameters of academic

success, which only has one set of parameters about sense of belongingness, about inclusive

curricula. Thus, the conclusion in the second part of this sentence can not be infered directly

from Table 5. Moreover, in the first part of discussion, unlike the result discussed above, the

summary of results showed that particitation in inclusive curricula had no relationship to sense

of belongingness (Glass & Westmont, 2014, p. 115) for both international and domestic

students. According to the Table 5, even though the sense of belongingness exerted positive

effect on academic success for both the international student (=0.34, p<.01) and domestic

student (=0.22, p<.01) (Glass & Westmont, 2014, p. 114), the result about academic success

can never directly be infered to the same content about sense of belongingness. Additionally, in

Figure 1 and Table 5 again, there is no data showed that whether the inclusive curricula had

relationship to sense of belongingness or not. Compared to the other parts of this paper which

showed the calculated results and infered from the collected data restrictly, results in the section

discussed above did not follow this rule well enough.

Secondly, considering the population of study sample, among the total 18,628 samples,

compared to 17,230 domestic students, there are only 1398 international students (Glass &
Westmont, 2014). Moreover, it seems that this number of the sample of international students

was not big enough to present the generality and particularity of the population of international

students, because it is even smaller than the number of some big universities international

enrollment. Besides, the final number of international students subgroup was only 415, which

was just approximately half of the number of domestic students subgroup (Glass & Westmont,

2014). Moreover, classificated by ages, there are different groups of international students, such

as high school students, undergraduates and graduates. Students from different age groups will

usually receive or gain sense of belongingness through different ways, as a result, the study of

this article on international undergraduate students cannot show the correct and representative

results of the study subject. Thus, both the number and variety of study sample can not perfectly

serve the accuracy of the results.

Finally, as the article mentioned, language proficiency might be another major reason for

international students to influence their social or academic communication (Glass & Westmont,

2014, p. 116). Refering to own experience, international students usually have a great number of

chances to commnunicate with their domestic classmates or professors, which can significantly

and quickly improve their language proficiency and let them get more involved in their new

study life abroad. Meanwhile, as the primary task of students, engagement in inclusive curricula

takes most of their time, and it is usually one of a few ways that international students can

participate in academic and cultural activities which they might have never experienced before

they came to America. As a result, it is hard to imagine that international students cannot

significantly receive sense of belongingness through the way they take part in the most.

In conclusion, it can never be denied that the two authors of this article did an undoubtedly

great job, and successfully proved most of their hypotheses of their study. However, considering
the analysis of data and results, the number and variety of studied sample and international

students own actual experiences, unlike the result of the article demonstrated, the international

students should noticeably gain sense of belongingness through engaging in inclusive curricula.

Works Cited
Council for International Education. (2006). New horizons: The experiences of international

students in UK further education colleges: Report of the UKCOSA survey. London: The

Council for International Education.

Glass, C. R., & Westmont, C. M. (2014). Comparative effects of belongingness on the academic

sucess and cross-culture interactions of domestic and international students. International

Journal of Intercultural Relations, 38, 106-119.

Schweizter, B., Morson, G., & Mather, P. (2011). Understanding the international student

experience. Baltimore , MD: American College Personnel Association.