Bridging the Language Divide: An Innovative Teaching Project to Help International Students from China in Learning Business Law Subjects

This paper describes and evaluates a teaching and learning project at the University of Technology Sydney that involved providing bi-lingual notes for corporate law in English and Chinese. The project can be seen as a novel response by educational institutions in Australia to problems associated with the internationalisation of education. Although educational institutions concentrate efforts on helping international students overcome ‘culture shock’, the authors argue that another level of assistance is needed, and one that more directly targets learning difficulties stemming from language issues. It is the writers’ hypothesis that language barriers and the lack of learning materials in the student’s first language represent a gap in teaching and learning mechanisms that are not adequately covered by focusing on learning difficulties as part of a ‘culture’ alone. The argument is put forward that educational institutions can enhance the learning experience of international students by providing basic learning materials in the student’s first language.