This chapter aims to provide recommendations for how colleges can best support working college students of immigrant origin. It examines which challenges these students encounter when juggling full-time studies with working 20 or more hours a week during the academic year. Drawing on findings from qualitative, semi-structured interviews with twenty-four undergraduate students of immigrant origin in the northeastern United States, we show that these students face a confluence of challenges. The participants experienced academic, emotional, and social difficulties resulting from a time deficit and found the unpredictability of work hours and schedules challenging. They reported stress, anxiety, emotional depletion, sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and a lack of faculty support. We offer program and policy suggestions for higher education administrations and faculty to stem this confluence of challenges. These include gathering institutional data about the labor force engagement of their student population, vetting jobs on and near campus for their “student friendliness” (set time schedules and predictable, limited hours), and educating students about which jobs are student-friendly.

This study was designed to investigate the contribution of non-native (L2) patterns of pausing to the perceived effort of listening to speech. English-language speech samples from ten native speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese (five of each) previously assessed as having intermediate proficiency in English were manipulated by removing all non-juncture silent pauses as well as all filled pauses. The original and manipulated speech samples, as well as samples of comparable but un-manipulated English speech produced by ten native speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese with higher English proficiency were evaluated in a between-groups design by 60 native speakers of American English. Although the removal of non-juncture pauses did not significantly alter listeners’ ratings of the intermediate speech, results did suggest a subtle interaction between ratings of effort and measures of listeners’ working memory capacity, suggesting that the detrimental effects of pausing in non-native accented speech may be related to increased demand on limited-capacity cognitive processing resources such as working memory.

The goal of this study was to examine the role of cognitive abilities in implicit learning of two types of contrasts — lexical tone contrasts and coronal consonant contrasts. Twenty-four adult native English speakers naïve to Vietnamese were asked to learn the names of twelve funny monsters, that is monosyllabic words differing in tones and initial consonants. After a word-identification training with feedback, learning was assessed using a 12-word alternative test and an auditory discrimination test. In addition, participants completed six tests of cognitive abilities involving episodic memory, working memory, executive function and attention, processing speed, and vocabulary (NIH & Northwestern University, 2006-2012). For both identification and discrimination, the proportion of tone errors was significantly larger than the proportion of consonant errors, but cognitive measures did not predict the occurrence of tone versus consonant errors. Processing speed and executive function and attention scores were significantly correlated with response accuracies in both tests. These results suggest that for beginning learners, individual differences in some cognitive abilities related to the fluid cognition complex correlate with implicit learning of phonetic categories of different types. However, working memory, arguably the most studied factor, appears not to matter in this learning scenario.