MANY ROOTS, MANY VOICES

The role of local students on the social interaction and academic development of exchange students

     For higher education students studying abroad cultural exchange can be one of the goals which they may set for themselves to accomplish. In an international experience like an exchange course the interaction of the foreign students with the native students may be an achievement as important as other more strictly academic ones. It might actually help the exchange student to adapt to the academic envirionment of the country he or she's in. In this same line of thought we can infer that there might be a certain role for the native student to play in the exchange students academic life. By sharing their experience and approximating the exchange students to their own academic envirionment, the local students may cause great benefit to the foreigner's overall social and academic development. I can describe some contribution swedish students provided me and other exchange students in a group work we had to develop. The swedish students helped us understand the evaluation of papers and exams and the course's requirements we had to focus more. They also gave us some tips of research material they had used in a previous course they had taken. 

       In the article “Challenges in teaching international students: group separation, language barriers and culture differences” the authors utilize data collected from a field research on the difficulties that exchange students have in their respective exchange courses. Amongst the factors they found to be influential was the receptivity of the local students:

• Cross-cultural orientation: Interest and openness in other cultures in local students is perceived as an important factor in friendship formation. Students that showed interests in traveling and Japanese culture were the most likely to form a cross-cultural friendship. Also, talking in class on common interests is perceived as important, as a student said, as reported in the article [8],

• Empathy: The capacity to understand an overseas student situation, far from its family and with language difficulties, was seen as crucial in building a long-lasting friendship; those students were more likely to establish relationships with local students that showed patience with their faltering English, and kindly wait for them to express what they think without interrupting. So, being patient in class with foreigner students seems a good practice. (Medved, Franco, Gao, Yang. 2013, p.5)”