Language, emotion and asking for help
My doctoral research asks how comfortable Chinese international students feel talking about distress in English, and whether knowing a Mandarin-speaking counselor is available changes who seeks help.
This page describes research, not counseling services. My counseling practice serves clients located in Washington State.
The question
Chinese students are one of the largest groups of international students in the United States, and research has long found that many Asian international students hesitate to use campus counseling, even when they're under real strain. My research asks about one part of why: whether the barrier is less about how well students speak English, and more about what it costs them to talk about distress in it.
The working question is this. Among Chinese international students at a US university, does comfort expressing emotional distress in English predict willingness to seek counseling? And does knowing that a Mandarin-speaking counselor is available change that relationship?
Why comfort, and not proficiency
Most studies measure English proficiency: how well a student reads, writes, speaks and understands. I'm keeping three things deliberately separate. Proficiency is what a student can do in English. Preference is which language they'd choose. Comfort is what emotional expression in a second language costs them.
The difference matters most for one kind of student: someone with near-native English who would still rather see a Mandarin-speaking counselor. A proficiency measure scores that student as highly fluent and misses exactly what matters about them. I've written about this idea for a general audience in Fluent isn't the same as at home.
Why it matters
If comfort turns out to matter more than proficiency, the practical answer for campus counseling centers is concrete. Hiring Mandarin-speaking counselors, and making their availability visible, is something a center can actually do. That's a more useful finding than one that only tells us students' English test scores.
Where it stands
The project is in development as part of my PhD in Counselor Education and Supervision at the University of Arizona. It has not begun collecting data, and like all research with people, it will go through university ethics review before it does.
Presentations
- Co-presenter, roundtable on multicultural counseling self-efficacy, stigma and training climate. Western Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (WACES), Reno, October 2026.
Get in touch
If you research language, culture and help-seeking, or you work with Chinese international students and want to compare notes, I'd be glad to hear from you at alan@lirelationshipcounseling.com.