Addressing Language barrier and Reduction of Academic Stress
Currently, the attainment of education has become a critical need for everyone. For this reason, there has been an increase in migration and travels for both children and adults seeking better educational facilities and to advance their careers. In 2007 alone, statistics revealed that over 3 million students were pursuing their studies abroad in countries like the United States, Germany, France, Spain, and China (Friedman, 2019, p. 7). However, this has posed a challenge to the language barrier for most students. According to recent research, a bigger percentage of migrant learners are disadvantaged because they are faced with a problem of the language barrier (Yu, & Shandu, 2017, p. 157). In fact, it has been affirmed that migrant learners have a considerable amount of stress, and as such, they are always underperforming compared to native learners. Nevertheless, even native students who are frustrated by classroom etiquette and differing cultural views face the same issue. Based on this insight, this paper seeks to explain how addressing language barriers will reduce stress related to academic performance.
Addressing language barriers at schools helps open other perspectives of students within their areas of interest. In most cases, students are limited by language barriers while exploring existing opportunities provided by other cultural groups or language. For instance, English students may want to associate with highly performing Spanish students. Still, due to the language barrier, their interactions are limited, and as a result, their performance is lowered. Regarding this, addressing such a scenario by incorporating linguistic studies will help students learn Spanish and associate with Spanish high performing students.
Besides, addressing language barriers will reduce stress through its benefits of improved cross-cultural interactions since language learning is carried out. Academically, increased interactions amongst students help reduce stress and boost effective performance. This is achieved as a result of enhanced, effective international interactions. Also, there is a diffusion of knowledge among students from different cultures. Alongside this, stress amongst students is reduced so that students’ appreciation of their home culture is increased, reduction of ethnocentrism, increased tolerance, cognitive complexity, greater personal awareness, and self-esteem amongst students. More significantly, students experiencing stress due to language barriers may achieve the same benefits from more positive cross-cultural interactions with students not facing language barriers.
Moreover, addressing language barriers helps improve the quantity and quality of academic engagements so that when students are well-versed with the most spoken language at school, their engagement and interaction with other students become proactively high. The implication for this increased interactions, reduced levels of stress, increased sharing of knowledge, which later translates to good performance. Makoni (2017) attests that students think more innovatively in languages they are more familiar with, mostly their native language. Incorporating language barrier interventions reduces stress by enabling students to learn other languages they are unfamiliar with and gain deep insight into it.
In conclusion, with the current growing number of students learning internationally, the language barrier has been identified as a key issue generating stress and affecting students’ performance levels. This paper sought to discuss how addressing language barriers will help reduce stress related to academic performance. Based on this discussion, it was found out that addressing language barriers helps reduce stress and boosts performance through three significant ways; one, helps open other perspectives of students, two, imp[roves cultural interactions among students from different cultural backgrounds, and lastly, it improves the quantity and quality of academic engagements amongst students from different cultures.
References
Friedman, C. (2019). Academic Stress is a Concern across Cultures [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. The Graduate School of Namseoul University.
Makoni, M. (2017, March 10). Addressing language barriers is key to student success. University World News. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20170306095908750
Yu, K., & Shandu, B. (2017). Overcoming language barriers: Lessons learned from migrant children. Perspectives in Education, 35(1). https://doi.org/10.18820/2519593x/pie.v35i1.12