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Tutoring
English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) Students
in the Academic Success
Centers
Midlands Technical College
While it is usually best for
ESL-trained tutors to work with ESL students, and the ultimate goal for
the ASC is to have ESL-trained tutors available whenever the center is
open, budget constraints mean that writing tutors will continue to work
with ESL students at present. Moreover,
some fluent bilingual students may not wish to be labeled as ESL and may
resist working with ESL tutors, but may still exhibit ESL issues in
their writing. Therefore, it is important for composition instructors
and writing tutors to develop their skills at working with ESL students.
This handout provides a few general
guidelines for working with ESL students in the areas below:
A.
Reading Comprehension in ENG 100, 101, and 102
Many of the readings in ENG 100 and
ENG 101 deal with popular culture issues, because the curriculum
is structured so that students begin by writing on topics they are
familiar with (e.g., single parenthood, underage drinking, light-bulb
jokes, race relations in America) and gradually move to topics they are
less familiar with (e.g., genetic research, literary essays).
But this technique can cause problems for ESL students who are
unfamiliar with American culture. Of
course, in today’s global culture, some students may be very familiar
with Tommy Hilfiger or Brittany Spears; others aren’t and will be very
confused by pop culture references in readings.
Even more troubling are the basic
cultural assumptions and worldviews underlying many literary essays
in ENG 101 and 102: what
one needs to know about Southern culture and religion, for example,
before Flannery O’Connor’s characters make sense.
I once had a group of international students read Langston
Hughes’ “Salvation” and assume that it was set in Great Britain.
International students may read Maya Angelou’s “Graduation”
without believing that there were really separate schools for white and
black children in the US. Students
who grew up in bustling cities--or large agricultural plantations--may
read Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” without realizing that the
American farm can be a very lonely place, or they may think it’s set
in the present day.
Grammar sometimes causes
problems in reading comprehension, too.
Students who aren’t tuned in to past tense v. present tense may
misread an author who alternates between reminiscing about her childhood
and commenting on the present.
Finally, just like native speakers,
students may fail to distinguish between main ideas and
details/examples.
To help a student understand a
reading that forms the basis for a writing assignment, it’s sometimes
useful to
- Begin
by asking the student general questions about the main idea of the
expository reading, what the geographical/time setting is for a work
of fiction, who the good guys/bad guys are, and so on, to shed light
on any glaring misunderstandings the students may have.
- Help
the student use colored highlighters to identify main
ideas/examples, present time/past time, and so on.
B.
Revision/Reorganization
The
rhetoric that we teach and use ourselves is as much an aspect of our
culture as food or dress. The idea of a thesis sentence may seem as
natural as the law of gravity, but it is really very specific to our
time and place. The same is true of our ideas of logic and evidence.
Some cultures value indirectness, and believe that a direct statement of
the thesis is an insult to the reader's intelligence (the same may hold
true of clearly stated transitions and conclusions). In some rhetorical
traditions, proof of a statement is accomplished by repetition or by
citing proverbs; elaboration and decoration of ideas may be valued more
highly than conciseness and specificity. ESL students' ways of thinking
and of expressing themselves may be totally different from those of
native speakers.
Older
students are especially likely to use patterns of essay organization
transferred from their first language.
This may mean that to an American reader, a Spanish speaker may
provide too much unnecessary background information in the introduction;
a Russian speaker may include annoying digressions throughout the essay;
and a Chinese speaker may not clearly state the thesis until the
conclusion paragraph.
- If
you can explain explicitly what the American reader’s expectations
are and how they differ from the expectations of readers in other
cultures, you may help the student realize that the writing style
that comes naturally to her may not be as effective for an American
reader.
- Some
students speak better than they write; if you are having trouble
understanding what they’re writing about in a draft, ask the
student to explain his or her point and then show you where he/she
attempted to communicate the same idea in writing.
After hearing the idea explained, you may be able to help the
student revise the idea in language the American reader can
understand.
C. Author’s
Ideas v. Student’s Ideas
Sometimes we composition instructors
take plagiarism as a personal insult to our intelligence, a
brazen attempt to cheat and a betrayal of our trust in the student as a
human being. (Sometimes
we’re right, even with ESL students.)
But sometimes students plagiarize simply because (a) they don’t
know how to quote or paraphrase, or (b) they come from a culture without
the concept of “owning” words or ideas.
If you see an instance where a
student has plagiarized from another source:
- Try
asking the student which sentences are her ideas and which are
another author’s. Say
“This sentence seems like your writing style, but this one
doesn’t.”
- Help
the student understand that you know what she wrote and what she
didn’t, sometimes using colored highlighters if necessary.
- Explain
that using someone else’s writing without citing it correctly is a
serious crime in American academic writing—and is a serious insult
to the reader.
- If
the plagiarized quote came from a reading or essay, you can then
show the student how to cite it correctly.
Note that paraphrasing is especially
difficult for ESL students, whose limited vocabulary may mean they only
know one way to say whatever is being said in the original source.
- If
a student can’t explain the idea to you out loud in her own words
without looking at the original, work with her on finding ways to
quote it instead of paraphrasing it.
D. Editing
Sentence
level problems:
Most ESL students will have more understanding of the grammar of
English than many native speakers; they may know what subjects and verbs
are, and even the names of tenses, so that errors like subject-verb
agreement can be explained. Indeed, many of the most common problems
will be the same ones that native speakers have: verb and pronoun
agreement, fragments and comma splices, spelling. However, in many areas
there will continue to be errors that may look awkward or unnatural to
teachers who are not used to ESL writing.
Interference
from first language:
Most sentence level problems do not result from transferring features
from the students' original languages, but from problems inherent in
learning English. However, some language backgrounds do result in
certain areas of difficulty.
· Speakers
of most Asian languages, for example, will find articles and word
endings (-s, -ed) a source of great difficulty, because their languages
do not inflect (especially for time).
· On the other hand,
because European languages are similar to English but not exactly like
it, speakers may use "false cognates" in vocabulary and false
analogies in grammar.
·
Many
languages, like Spanish, do not require a stated subject for verbs(
"Came to town")
·
Arabic,
Chinese and others do not require a stated linking verb ("We
busy").
Vocabulary: An ESL student may use
words in ways that sound very strange to us, and yet we may not be able
to explain why they seem strange. As native speakers acquiring
the language, we learn not only the meaning of a word but also how it
can be combined with other words. For example, we pay a bill but cash
a check; an ESL writer might think it correct to pay a check.
When students misuse words in these ways, it's probably simplest just to
show them the correct collocation (combination of words), unless the
explanation of the reason can be very simple and clear. Selecting
synonyms and using phrasal verbs may cause special difficulties for ESL
students, and may be treated the same way.
·
If you can tell what a
student is trying to say but they’ve gotten the wrong word, feel free
to write down the word or a short phrase (e.g., “brought up the
subject of _____”) for
the student to copy to use in the essay.
By doing so you are helping the student acquire new vocabulary,
rather than “cheating” for the student.
·
Of course, writing out
whole sentences for a student brings up the question of who’s actually
writing the essay (!)
Prepositions: Although some
prepositions have a very clear meaning (sleeping on the bed is
different from sleeping under the bed), others may have very overlapping meanings and may in different
dialects of English be used in different ways: "he is at the
store" vs. "he is to the store"; even within one
dialect, a slight change in the sentence can change the preposition:
"I sympathize with her" vs. "I have sympathy for
her." We should not be
surprised to find even a fairly good writer of English writing "I
sympathize for her." Prepositions
are also used in many English idioms and phrasal verbs, e.g. making
out, which is very different from making up.
·
Start training the
students you work with to memorize vocabulary words with prepositions as
phrases, e.g., research on X, compare X with Y, put up
with X, discriminate against X, etc.
Verb
forms: ESL students have
problems with choosing between simple present and progressive tenses (I
study now vs. I am studying now), modals (can vs. could), and selection
and sequence of tenses. Most of the verb rules are clear and learnable,
but speakers of languages that do not show time by changing the verb
(Chinese, Korean, etc.) may take longer to understand this, and speakers
of languages similar to English may mistakenly transpose the rules of
their language onto English.
·
Most of the time
it’s best for an ESL tutor to work with students on verb tense issues.
·
However, simple issues
such as switching from past to present tense can be handled by talking
the student through the essay: “Now,
here you said you walked to school, so as the reader I’m
thinking this is still a story about your childhood.
But here you say ‘I see my friend.’ Did you switch to talking about now, or are you still talking
about the past? If it’s
the past, then what should you say instead of see?”
Complex
Sentences:
All languages have ways of combining sentences, but usually the spoken
version is much less complex. Students whose spoken English is good may
still find subordination confusing because they practice it so little.
Some examples of problems: students may attempt to use a clause as an
object of a preposition ("I am late because of my car broke
down"); they may not drop the original pronoun when substituting a
relative pronoun ("This is the test which I took it last
week"). Some advanced ESL students may write very long sentences in
which many subordinate clauses occur in a long but awkward sentence.
· If you see a sentence
that mystifies you, check to see if there’s a subordinator such as which,
that, who, whom, where, or why missing. Example: The
author defines self-starter as a person ___ goes out and gets what he or
she needs.
Punctuation: Many languages use the
same punctuation marks, even those that use very different systems of
writing (Arabic and Chinese, for example). The problem for ESL students
is that the marks are the same, but the rules for using them are very
different. A comma may be used between two sentences in many languages,
for example.
·
For fragments and
run-on sentences, it may help to work at the computer screen with the
student, and have the student hit “enter” after each period in a
paragraph. Then the student
can look at each “sentence” independently and decide whether it’s
a fragment, a complete sentence, or two+ complete sentences.
·
Sometimes it helps to
dispense with technical terms such as run-on, and comma splice.
Instead, draw brackets around problem sentences and write in the
margins “two sentences” (for comma splices) and “all one
sentence” (for fragments).
Articles
(A, An, The):
The rules governing the usage of articles in English are very complex
and difficult to master; linguists still argue over what the rules are,
exactly. Speakers of languages that do not have articles (e.g., Russian
and Chinese) may never completely master article usage, but even
speakers of Arabic, Spanish, or even some dialects of English may have
such different rules for article usage that they will continue to write
"we must protect the nature" (compared to "we must
protect the environment").
· In general, article
errors aren’t as important as other errors, because they usually
don’t impede communication.
· It's
best not to spend too much time trying to explain why to use a certain
article.
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