The teaching assistant, a graduate student from China, possessed a finely honed mind. But he also had a heavy accent and a limited grasp of spoken English, so he could not explain to Ms. Serrin, a freshman at the time, what her report had lacked.
'He would just say, 'It's easy, it's easy,' ' said Ms. Serrin, who recently completed her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley. 'But it wasn't easy. He was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but he couldn't communicate in English.'
Ms. Serrin's experience is hardly unique. With a steep rise in the number of foreign graduate students in the last two decades, undergraduates at large research universities often find themselves in classes and laboratories run by graduate teaching assistants whose mastery of English is less than complete."
