Passive acceptance and difficult concepts....joy joy.

ESL students are different. There are subtle differences that I did not notice until they were pointed out to me, and there are glaring differences that astonished me the first time I tutored an ESL student. For example, an ESL student that came in today to be tutored had a very well organized paper. She had a few words that were wrong, tab instead of tap for example. But her confidence in her work was almost non existent. She did not like me reading the paper aloud, she did not ever argue with any change I suggested, and after we had finished she earnestly inquired if her sentences made sense. Now truth be told her paper was quite good. Save the minor errors that marked her as learning English, her paper was informative, well organized, and rhetorically competent.

But this girl was completely unsure of herself. I could have told her to start over and she would have nodded and done so without complaint. It really caught me off guard. I know that this is not isolated to ESL students, nor are all ESL students this unsure of themselves. But it is a trend I have noticed, a willingness on the part of ESL students to allow me to dominate the session and mark all over their papers. If anything I almost feel less willing to make suggestions because of the passivity with which they are accepted.

As to explaining that which I know inherently without any real reasons...well, of course it is hard. I've been there. I think of an argument I had with Michael Madson today about commas. I wanted to know why there had to be a comma there. He insisted that was just the way it was and it was not debatable. Although I trusted Michael's wisdom on the matter there are still issues in my native language that I don't understand. Trying to explain them to someone else can be intimidating.