Tuesday, October 20, 2009
class 10/21
The assigned readings for this week were definitely up my ally for what I have been experiencing in the writing center recently. For every 1 NES student I tutor, I tutor 2 ESL students. I have found this week as opposed to last week, that I am more comfortable than I was, which is nice because I project what I'm feeling a lot and if I'm nervous, I know they are. The readings suggested that there are certain ESL students that may be more apprehensive about going to the writing center than NES students because of cultural differences, particularly pertaining to men. I have not found this to be the case, however, I don't discount the possibility that this may happen in the future. I do believe very much in breaking the ice, which is true for anyone, but especially ESL students because they are out their element entirely. On the other hand, I don't want to discount their resilience because if they weren't extremely bright and independent thinking, they wouldn't be studying here in the first place. This is to say that I think there is a fine line between how differently we treat ESL students from NES ones. Dr. Shaw brought up something very important the other day in class when he said that a lot of ESL students have better vocabularies and rudimentary grammar skills than NES students; they can just have a hard time with their verb tense and placement. This is spot on to what I've been seeing lately and directly in accordance with Matsuda and Cox's idea about avoiding taking an assimilationist's stance. One girl in particular that I was helping with a paper used unusual, yet very poignant ways to describe things that I would never use because I have been using and repeating the same words for so long in the same way. These authors encourage tutors to praise ESL students on their word choice, as long as its correct, because it is often so unique and displays more of the student's personality. Also, I found it refreshing when I read that professors often don't penalize ESL students for minor article and tense issues as long as their ideas are understandable and well conveyed. I hope this is true, as it would make tutoring these students even more effective if I know that I don't have to focus on the small errors.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
That is very true about the attitude/atmosphere you project. If they see you're nervous, they will be nervous as well. A couple of my tutoring sessions were a little awkward because I felt awkward and that definitely set the tone.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to see you integrating what we talked about in the tutor panel to your reflective practice. It is very difficult to find that fine line, as you put it, between working with ESL-specific issues (because, again, these students are acquiring language) and working with ESL clients as writers, first and foremost. It's easy to lose the meaning in the grammar.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised by how many ESL clients you've had. Yet another instance of why I'd like to do some real tracking to see who uses our writing center and when - maybe we could have some ESL-trained tutors on hand during those peak ESL hours, if we could identify them!
You mentioned the comment that Dr Shaw made about ESL students generally having a broader vocabulary than NES students and i have found this to be true so far.
ReplyDeleteI liked how you said "...girl in particular that I was helping with a paper used unusual, yet very poignant ways to describe things that I would never use because I have been using and repeating the same words for so long in the same way." That is so true! We usually tend to choose the same phrases that work for us repeatedly rather than find new ways to say the same thing. (unless we right click on our word and select synonyms while we are typing in microsoft word!)