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.

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.

Whenever I need to explain why English sometimes doesn't obey its own rules, I always start by reminding a non-native speaker that this is normal English behavior. English usually doesn't obey its own rules. It seems to me that the only reason English can be said to have rules is so that it can come up with exceptions to those rules. I try to put the non-native speaker at ease by assuring them the failure is not theirs; it's the languages. English is weird. Even German, which is Englishes closest living relative, is vastly more logical than English. German has its rules and obeys them. English is an outlaw. It LOVES to break the rules. English delights in lulling the non-native speaker into a false sense of security by pretending to behave logically, and then BAM!!!! For no apparent reason, the rule does not apply.

This wasn't done on purpose. English is like that because it is a creole. English is what happens when 90% of the population speaks Anglo-Saxon, but when they go up to "the big house," they're expected to speak French without having any formal instruction in French. English is perfectly normal when you compare it to other creole languages.

English is crazy because it is ambivolent towards itself. It wants to take a French vocabulary, which is inflected (is that the right word? I think it is.) and combine it with a German syntactical structure. An inflected vocab means that words have endings that tell the hearer what part of speech that word serves. There are noun endings and verb endings and adjective endings, etc. But a Germanic syntax is based on word order. The order inwhich words are spoken gives the meaning. These elements come into conflict in English quite often, and that's why English seems to disagree with itself so often. Combine that with the last four hundred years of linguistic evolution and Englishes love of word-borrowing, and its a pretty hard language to learn if you didn't take it with your mother's milk. Non-native speakers who learn a second language rely heavily on logical behavior, and English is an illogical language.

I hope this little explanation is at least mostly true. This is essentially how it was explained to me by Tom Mathews. I usually don't mind spreading lies on the internet, but I at least want to know I'm doing it. If anyone knows something specific that I'm screwing up, please feel free to correct me.

Adrian

Blogging and ESL + my first ESL Session

Blogging is not my style; I am finding that the personal and familiarity used in writing a blog is very foreign to me. I learned to approach writing from an outside, keeping myself at a distance from what ever subject I was discussing. With blogging I am finding myself trying to stuff myself into a form that just does not come naturally; even now I am struggling to keep my writing from drifting to an outside view of blogging. As I struggle to fit in to a more familiar style I find that I am spending a lot more effort, energy, and time trying to say what I mean. With as much trouble as I have adjusting my style of writing to blogging, I can not imagine how much harder it would be to try and blog in a different language. This small struggle of my own has given me a much greater appreciation for what ESL students are having to go through in order to try and conform to an American conception of writing.

I wrote the previous paragraph while waiting for my shift to start. During my shift I had my first session with an ESL student. To my relief it went a lot smoother than I was afraid it would. The prospect of tutoring native speakers did not really worry me. But the idea of trying to explain ways of writing and rules that I know without knowing made me question how I would ever get through a session with an ESL student. Thankfully I was not left with a dumb look on my face wondering how to explain something I knew was correct but not why it is. Instead I found that I was able to answer the ESL student’s question of why it is better to use a lot instead of lots in a paper. Perhaps I know more than I realize, and will be able to explain some of the other rules I know without knowing. But then again I may just have delayed looking dumb for a few more days. Either way I feel a little more confident that I will be able to help ESL students when they come into the writing center.

The other thing that surprised me was how well the paper was written. There were only a few minor errors in the paper that could have been left alone since they did not detract from the idea of the paper or make it difficult to understand. With how well the paper was written I have started to wonder if I should be more worried about trying to help a native speaker than I was about helping ESL students. It is too early to tell now, but if my first experience with an ESL student is any where near how most of them will be, I think I might just end up enjoying ESL sessions more than those with a native speaker.

Things Aren't as Hard as They Seem

Although I have profoundly enjoyed our discussions in class about ESL tutoring ( I thought that our speaker on Monday was incredibly insightful and helped me realize just what I’m getting myself into), I have not yet had the opportunity to tutor an ESL student. In fact, so far I’ve only had one opportunity of tutoring anybody, but that one experience made me realize something that I think applies to every type of student we might get. After sitting dutifully in the writing center for about forty-five minutes my first session, in comes three students, each simultaneously needing advice. Although I had been planning on observing a more experienced tutor at work for my first session, I didn’t really have a choice other than to just dive into the experience head first. The boy I was talking to needed help with topic sentences and transition phrases. As I began explaining the importance of these writing techniques to him, I noticed that in his paragraphs he already had written his topic sentence, but had simply put it in the wrong place. After pointing this out to him, I think he and I realized simultaneously that he had known more than we both thought he had. It was actually quite a fulfilling moment when he walked out of there, appearing at least, to feel better about himself and his writing skills.

My point to the story is that I think sometimes the people we are tutoring actually are doing more than us tutors and the students themselves give them credit for. At least with this tutee, all he needed was a prod in the right direction. I think that this idea applies to ESL students in a similar way. Although these students don’t have the same natural proficiency of the language that native speakers have, maybe it’s possible that their teachings have stuck with them more than anyone expected. I am a student of French and often times when I feel that I am doing everything wrong, I find that I am doing much better than I ever imagined I could be and that, honestly, all is not wrong with the world. My problem with my first tutee was that I was so intent on focusing on the wrong things in his paper, that I almost missed the right. I know that what I am focusing on is perhaps relatively ideal compared to the basic reality for most students, but I think there are some cases where the student’s answer is right in front of them and they just haven’t seen it yet. Maybe sometimes the students will simply need an assurance that the path they are taking is the right one, especially if they are so unfamiliar with the language that nothing seems right.

Anyways, back to the main topic at hand, I believe that sometimes that are things about our English language that simply can’t be explained clearly to somebody to whom it is completely foreign to begin with. As Dr. Curtis advised, we may just have to correct the ESL student without a viable explanation as to why, simply because it makes the sentence flow better. I am sure that this must be a very frustrating situation for the student as it is a rather awkward one for the tutor. The main thing with ESL students, in my opinion, is to get their confidence and their ease with the language up in any way possible. Of course, this is obviously the whole point of the writing center in theory, but like I said before maybe at times the problem is an easier fix than we first thought. After beginning a lengthy explanation on the importance of topic sentences and how to formulate them to my student, I realized that it was almost entirely unnecessary. As soon as I pointed out the sentence in his paper that, in reality, was his topic sentence the comprehension dawned in his eyes. Basically, especially for us high strung folks, life just isn’t as complicated as it seems.

Wrestling with My Own Language

I had my first experience tutoring an ESL student today. I am happy to say that it was a delightful session and that I learned a lot. I found the student to be patient and understanding. I think this helped to make my experience a good one.

I did run into the problem of trying to explain the particulars of our sometimes unexplainable language to her. She had written, "I was so tired to drive." Of course, I advised her to say she was "too tired to drive." However, just three sentences later, she wrote, "I was so tired." She immediately pointed out that we should change it to say, "I was too tired." I reassured her that the way she had written it was correct, but she pointed out that we had previously changed the same phrase. It was then that I found myself fumbling through a limited vocabulary for the right words to explain why both ways were correct in different places. I am sure that everything I said confused her. Yet, she smiled, nodded, and gracefully accepted my explanation. I was relieved to find that she trusted me and took my advice despite my inability to articulate the reasons well.

During the session, I found myself appreciating Giana's presentation, which helped me to realize the already-rich educational background of many ESL students. The student I met today was older and obviously accomplished. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed my first experience, but this may have been because of the student's attitude. She complimented and thanked me profusely. Who doesn't like a little praise? The one part of the session that surprised me was the length. It took 45 minutes. After I was done, Claire mentioned that this is normal for such sessions. She also advised me to take a 5-minute break following the session. This was wise advice becuase I did find myself slightly exhausted after wrestling so hard with my own language.

Flurious

I met with my first ESL student today. He came in and was very shy. I asked him what he wanted to work on. He said grammar. I asked if I could read the paper aloud; he was reluctant to let me. He came in for English 1010, but the vocabulary he used was way more advanced than that of a normal 1010 student. His word choice was not only correct but refreshing and original. The assignment was an introductory paper about himself. I learned that he had already earned a bachelor's degree in China, and that he had interned at a huge accounting firm over there.

His grammar and word choice were great, but the organization of some of his sentences was confusing. I found myself saying, "this needs to be at the beginning of the sentence," but I couldn't explain why. The ideas came out in the wrong order. I have no idea what makes the way I had him change them "the right order," but it was the right order. When I attempted to explain why and I couldn't, he looked at me like "My writing is still making sense, why aren't you?"


I have had the experience of living in a foreign country and learning another language. I think the best language learning advice that I was given before I left was: English isn't Spanish. That statement is even more true when you are trying to compare Mandarin and English, like my tutee was. There really aren't words to describe the frustration that learning a new language brings, so I will make one up. Flurious-adj: A word that describes the necessary frustration a person will experience in learning a second language. The ESL writer is going encounter a lot of potentially flurious situations as they learn English. The hardest part for them can be letting go of their established ideas of order. As tutors, it is our job to have enough knowledge so that we can properly explain the "whys" of the English language.

I'm the first to post, with nothing to say

I have not had the opportunity to work with any non-native speakers in this tutoring position. But I think the question can be applied to working with people who do speak the language as well. For example, even if the person you are sitting with understands exactly what you are saying it can still be hard to explain why a sentence is a fragment, or why something is passive. You can demonstrate with examples and try to explain, but sometimes words do not spring to the tip of your tongue to explain something that comes so naturally to you in a way that the student would understand.

And now, jumping to a different but somewhat related idea….The grad students have had a chance to read a couple of essays about the ESL program and an essay from the point of view of someone from a different culture struggling to fit in to academic world. One of the most interesting things about these essays was the concept that the composition department on campus is completely separate from the English department, and this is something that has been institutionalized for a number of years. I think this would be discouraging to non-native speakers, mainly because it seems to send the message that they are not good enough to participate in regular college courses. I do not know if the separation of departments causes frustration or comfort to non-native speakers, but it must be discouraging to have little understanding about your situation from other departments on campus. At the same time it must be nice to go to a place where other students are having the same struggle you are, and there are teachers and people there who can help you with the problems you are facing in class.

Finally, a conclusion that kind of ties in with the first paragraph, but really has nothing to do with the second paragraph. One of the things I really wanted to take away from class on Monday was the fact that most of these students are intelligent and know their stuff; they just do not have a way to communicate it yet. I think sometimes we like to think we know the answers just because we can articulate the answers, but most of these students have far more experience than we do. Giana kept talking about how impressed she was with these students and their willingness to come to a new country and get a degree in a new language. I agree with her. While I have yet to work with any of these students I am sure my opportunity will arise and when it does I want to remember that they have many talents, and they are incredibly brave to come here and do what they do. My job is to help them find a way to communicate what is already in their head in a manner that will strengthen their paper and hopefully teach them how to communicate in English.

That's Just The Way It Is

Following up on our discussion from Monday, I'm curious to hear what you all have to say about the particulars of tutoring non-native speakers.  Have you had the experience yet?  How did it go?  What kinds of problems arose, if any?  One thing I found when I tutored was that working with non-native speakers forced me to confront just how much of the language I just-plain-know-and-don't-really-know-why.  Why, if I'm in the lobby of a hotel (an hotel?) where there are 4 elevators, do I say "I got on the elevator" and not "I got on an elevator"?  Have you experienced this?  What did you do?  How do you explain those bits of English that you just know?