EFBNL--Hold On To Your Chair

I didn’t really get a chance to be nervous over tutoring an ESL student—my first three sessions on my first morning in the Writing Center were with ESL students. The sessions went smoothly, and yes, I learned a lot. Probably more than they did.

The first paper I looked at was very well written with just a few minor errors. I noticed this student consistently misused the word “this” for “these,” yet read the sentences correctly out loud. Her Spanish vowels were finding their way into English--she knew the sound of the word she wanted to use, just not the spelling. In another session, the student used dashes rather than periods throughout her paper. Is this common practice in other countries? I don’t know. At any rate she was consistent.

A third student came in to notify me that he would be returning later with his paper. He explained that his ideas for the paper were in Korean inside his head and it would take some time to get them out and into English. This gave me flashbacks to those days in Spanish class when my papers stubbornly insisted on English inside my head.

I have a huge amount of respect for these students. In my limited experience it seems that ESL students are very eager for any help the tutor can give. They appear to be less attached to their writing—changes are not painful. They want to improve their writing in English and are willing to work hard to do it. And so far I haven’t encountered any problems…except maybe one…

I don’t know if you’d consider him an ESL student because English was his first language before he moved to Europe for 15 years. Now he’s back. Maybe we could call him an English-as-a-first-but-neglected-language student (EFBNL). At any rate, he came in and asked for help with his comparison paper as his English is a bit rusty. He wanted to make sure his argument was clear, that his diction was correct, and his humor apparent. Boy howdy. My eyes staggered over his title: “Wieners Are Not a Sign of Manliness.”

Now, I’m a professional, right? I figured I could handle this. Without blinking I asked him to read the first paragraph to me. I quickly figured out that he was writing about hot dogs v. Polish sausages—which he apparently loves. Wieners, on the other hand, are puny and lack the firmness, length, and juiciness of a big ol’ Polish. Let’s just say he then went into great sensory detail about the cooking and eating of sausages, about the manliness that one feels, the nirvana. I nearly lost it when he got to the sentence about “wiener dogs on a stick over an open flame.” Try to get that picture out of your head. Poor little dogs.

He read to the bitter end. I was hoping that someone else could hear our conversation so I could replay it later. I was waiting for Claire to tell me I passed some sort of test. No such luck. He turned to me, pointed to the paper, and said, “Do you think anyone will be offended that I used that word?” He was pointing to “sissy-boys.” I assured him that “sissy-boys” was fine in that context, but he might want to rethink his use of the word “wiener” as “hot dog” might be more widely recognized. “But they’re wieners,” he insisted. I explained that the word carries slang meaning. “I don’t get it,” he said. “What meaning?”

And I just couldn’t do it. “I automatically think of Dachshunds,” I said. “You can see how this could change the meaning of your entire essay, right?” He thought about it for a minute and then started to laugh. He penciled “hot dog” into the margin and said he’d think about the change.

Right or wrong? I don’t know. We both survived and I didn’t fall off my chair.