Word: abroader
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...Cofradia, Honduras, last year a fellow American student confessed to me that she was rather disappointed with her study abroad experience. Her Spanish wasn’t getting better, and she wasn’t having “transformative cultural experiences...
...probably spoke English less than half of the time. At first I thought her situation was an individual problem—that some people had trouble connecting with a foreign culture because they were less outgoing and adventurous. However, the real problem is that the structure of study abroad programs isolates students from the native culture...
...standard setup of a study abroad program, a student lives either with other students or with a host family. Arrangements skew towards the former; in 21 of the 26 Harvard Summer School Programs for 2009, participants will live with other students either in dorms or in a hotel. Students mostly attend classes at a local university. In this setup it is hard to get maximum exposure to another culture. Students tend to become friends with the people they associate with the most: their classmates and housemates. These are usually other Americans or foreigners who can speak English and are familiar...
...existing mainly within this safe social space, students studying abroad drastically reduce their ability to understand another culture. Whenever they experience something significant, it is filtered and interpreted by several different like-minded perspectives. Such experiences themselves are limited because, in another university environment, students tend to drift toward a lifestyle similar to the one they practiced at home. The standard class-study-party triad rebuilds itself with a more interesting background. There is little opportunity for interaction with locals and local culture, other than with shopkeepers and teachers—relationships that will always be one-sided...
...steady rise in the RMB's value against the dollar. As a senior executive at a state-owned financial institution conceded to TIME two weeks ago, there is undeniable pressure from China's politically powerful export sector to weaken the RMB, which would make Chinese goods more price competitive abroad. If China triggered a wave of devaluations from other East Asian countries that are its export-market competitors, most economists believe the result could be catastrophic, increasing deflationary pressures in the developed world and quite possibly leading to protectionist measures that would add immeasurably to the already grim problems...