What makes graduate studies an arduous endeavour?

It might, for example, be decided to have the mother tongue used as a medium of instruction in the primary school so as to ensure that the child's educational development is rooted in his own cultural heritage, and then transfer to a foreign language as the medium for secondary education. Or it might be thought more practicable to introduce the foreign language at the beginning of the child's school career, but restrict its use to the teaching of certain subjects.

Criper and Widdowson, Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching, Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics

As beginner specialists, we used to experience some difficulties with subjects of major during our first and second years at the Faculty of Education. The difficulty derived, for the most part, from the mountainous amount of new and specialised vocabulary. After all, we weren't taught primarily in English when at school. Neither did we have to worry about new vocabulary at all. The task has usually been made easy by teachers and non-prescribed materials which presented vocabulary, in particular, in an easily accessible and effortless manner on our part as students. Therefore, we used to be lazy as to pursue the meaning of new words in dictionaries, for instance, or exert any sort of effort whatsoever in obtaining lexical information. Entering college, we should have had a different sort of expectation which, although most of us had, did not work effectively for our benefit. Instead, we remained passive weeping our lot not having been prepared for such an all-inclusive learning environment.

Failure to obtain and digest new vocabulary has contributed to our poor or imperfect understanding of the prescribed materials. The best student would be the passionate reader who read again and again in order to get to grips with the materials and then helped his classmates, who in turn became expectants of voluntary aid. Worse, the majority of us have turned to the Internet for some instant accessible help that might count in the exam. Disastrous enough, this has led many to copy some junk materials and extract them in the exam paper without any sort of understanding. After any test, one usually forgot what the whole course was about. We would get good grades after all!

Leaving college with a studying mechanism as such is a dreadful thing in graduate work. Graduate studies' maintainers, that is to say teachers at graduate level, expect a different model from their students; quite the reverse, hence the existing gap between graduate students and their teachers.

Here is the problem. The solution is one that can be effected by both teachers and students on an equal footing. Teachers are the planners and executers of graduate programmes. My proposition is that a needs assessment test be taken by students who apply for a graduate programme. Teachers then study the results and tailor a remedy and incorporate it in their programmes. Students, on their part, are no longer to stay in the shade. They can, I propose, take part in group work compiling and generating glossaries and vocabulary exercises for, say, the literary texts they study. Teachers can assign, monitor and advise the production of such a work as a mid-year, (extracurricular) activity that might be taken into consideration when evaluating students. The task can go as follows: first, (1) students are divided into groups of four or five. Then (2) they are assigned a task of compiling a glossary of vocabulary supplemented with exercises for a particular text. (3) They are then required to propose a schedule for presenting their work and sitting for advisory sessions. Teachers can precede this by introducing some techniques to achieving such a task him-/herself or elicit some from the students to set a framework for the task. The final product can be incorporated as an introductory/pre-reading activity with the texts. This, I believe, would make the readers' task easier and would eliminate distraction happening when having to leaf through a dictionary every now and then during reading so that attention will mainly be focused on the content rather than vocabulary.

Such a proposition, if effected I believe, would be a step towards consolidating and strengthening understanding of academic literature on the way of guaranteeing a minimum level of competence the graduate student is expected to enjoy.