In a sports game, you only have so much time on the clock, your actions directly affect the people you are working with and overall, what you want is to succeed. Therefore, knowing what the weak spot is of the person charging towards you gives you an unparalleled advantage that can allow you to succeed and succeed well. Similarly, as the article, “Influence of cultural and linguistic background on the writing of Arabic and Japanese students of English” by Bouchra Moujtahid explores, having previous knowledge of the ESL student’s anticipated weakness before a consultation can allow you to have the most effective session possible. Moujtahid narrows in on the examples of both Arabic and Japanese students to highlight the ways in which the lessons, rules and guidelines of one’s native language and culture directly affect the ways in which he or she write.
Having worked directly with several Japanese and Arabic students, I have found that Moujtahid’s experiences are not only similar to my own, but that his conclusions posses crucial information that could have been pivotal to my sessions. I think for any consultant, acknowledging that the student being helped is not stupid, lazy or wrong, but is just following different rules, allows the consultant and the tutor to work more cohesively together. Moujtahid emphasizes this saying, “the difference between their native language and the language they are trying to learn are the cause for most errors.” Understanding this then allows the tutor to not only address the problem as it pertains to the paper, but the root of it as well. As a result, “knowing certain mistakes a student is more likely if they come from a particular country can help make you more aware.” It is only after an interaction such as this that a student can learn to fix these mistakes on his or her own in the future. I think it can often be lost during consultations that the sessions themselves are not just for one paper, but serve as learning environment as well, teaching students how to be stronger writers across the board.
A few weeks ago, I was helping a man from Egypt studying English who was clearly struggling with many of the same issues Moutahid details in his article. He had a tendency to smile, nod and remain positive even when he did understand a particular lesson. As a result, we would move forward only to realize he wasn’t soaking in what we were doing. Within his writing, he liked to repeat himself over and over, even if the claim he was making in one sentence had previously been made and was by no means furthering his argument. The article addresses this very issue saying, “Arabs tend towards exaggeration, emotionalism, overstatement and what is sometimes called “‘purple prose.’” Understanding that this is the case makes it much easier to not only be prepared for such repetition, but to explain to a student how it becomes distracting to a western reader. At the time, I was a little lost as to what to do. He was clearly nervous and I didn’t want to further embarrass him by suggesting lots of changes and left the session unsure of how useful I had been. Thinking back, I think if I understood Moujtahid’s idea that, ““In Arabic writing “there is a greater emphasis upon the form of the expression than upon the content which is being expressed,”’ I would have known to specifically address issues concerning structure in western writing that could have helped to reduce his repetition.
Recently, I have also worked with a Japanese student who I have previously mentioned in my blog. Reading this article’s commentary that Japanese feel that other forms of communication are “more sincere than language” and therefore, find it necessary to convey their meaning in another way, was very interesting. I very much found this to be the case, as there were times when quotes were placed randomly without analysis, explanations, transitions and ties were left out and the student looked at me as if I was slightly stupid when I explained that I didn’t understand certain connections.
With this said though, he states at the end of the article, “These differences between Arabs and Japanese are exactly what students of the two cultures would predict.” Despite my agreeing with him, I have considered whether or not we should also be aware of the assumptions we are making. Although I completely agree that anticipating common errors can help both the student and the tutor be more successful, I think it is still important to take each session with a case to case approach.
After reflecting on this article, I do also begin to wonder whether or not writing style is not only the direct product of not only what is typical in a particular area, but also encapsulates or represents a culture’s ideologies.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
ESL is not as easy as ABC
“Do you understand what I mean when I say…” is a common phrase I use when tutoring ESL students. Although, often, the problems my students have arise from having been taught a different grammatical principle or not understanding how to organize a paper, it became clear to me during a recent tutoring session with an ESL student that some of the problems students face come from a more fundamental problem. As a result of this, not only can it make your session more difficult as you struggle to find the right approach, but can cause the student to become frustrated or to tune you out.
During my most recent session, a student with whom I had met a few times before to discuss more informal assignments came to see me with his paper. Although this student is more advanced in terms of his language skills than many of the students I have seen, I was amazed to find that he had absolutely no idea how to write an analytical paper. His assignment was to talk about one book with another book’s perspective in mind for his FYS class. In its essence, his assignment was the typical, "compare and contrast" the arguments of two different books style essay. With that said however, his paper lacked a thesis, a real argument and left me more confused about the topics of the two books than when I started. What was most interesting about this experience was that his mistakes were very different than any I had encountered before. This hit me immediately as I began to read his introduction paragraph, as I was surprised to find that it gave no indication of the argument of the paper, but was merely a summary of one of the books. Leigh Ryan and Lisa Zimmerelli speak to this type of problem in chapter five of their book, The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors, when they say, “Other cultures approach a problem by giving a detailed history first, information that other writers might find unnecessary.” Although caught off guard, I did my best not to discourage the student, but to work with him to help him understand the importance of an introduction paragraph to the paper and to explain to him that although it is ok to have a little bit of summary, there are also many other things that need to be included.
Another example of why this paper was unusual compared to the style of western writing I am used to was that, throughout his paper, he would interject questions in italics as if to provoke a certain thought from his audience. However, the problem with this was that the very questions he was proposing were the same ones he needed to be answering himself through his argument. Leigh Ryan and Lisa Zimmerelli explain that, the purpose of writing can be different for an ESL student, as they were often taught that writing had a different meaning or was supposed to bring forth a different type of reaction than what the western style of writing teaches. With this student’s paper, it seemed like it stemmed towards the “exaggeration and emotionalism” that Ryan and Zimmerelli mention as being typical. I discovered that the student was less trying to argue a particular point or claim than he was trying to retell certain details of the story in a more beautiful way, while forcing the reader to make the conclusions on their own. This is very similar to many of the concepts we discussed last class having to do with cultural backgrounds influencing a student’s style of writing. I think it is important to be aware of a student’s academic past to understand where their weaknesses might be in order to best help them improve.
With this said however, I was still very unsure of how to proceed, not wanting to offend the student, but also knowing that this was an unacceptable standard of organization and argumentation for almost all professors. I therefore, took Ryan and Zimmerelli’s advice that “culture determines acceptable ways of presenting information and in a tutoring session, acknowledging cultural differences often means explaining appropriate rhetorical patters for standard academic English.” Once I realized that the student was unaware of the mistakes he was making, we worked together to recreate the outline of his paper. Using ideas he already had written down, but not flushed out, and put them in a new order on a separate sheet of paper. In order to be able to do this, I definitely had to employ a more dialectic approach, constantly asking him questions and making conclusions based on what he had written and how he answered to then ask my next question. This way, despite the peculiarities of the paper, I was able to “respond first to the content and organization of their paper, as you would with any writer,” like Ryan and Zimmerelli suggest. This way, together we were able to manipulate his old paper into a new structure while preserving all his own ideas, just putting them in an order that made them into an argument, not just a bunch of statements.
Although that hurdle had been jumped, I soon discovered that we had another issue to deal with: he had some issues with fundamental aspects of an analytical paper. It turned out that the approach the student had been taught was very different from the western style we are used to. When he was making a claim about one of the books, he had summarized the events that had occurred in a few pages to use as support for the point he wished to make. Not only was there very little introduction or analysis of the events he paraphrased, but it also became apparent to me that he had not used a single quotation. When I asked him why he had chosen that method, I uncovered that he did not know how to use quotations for evidence in a paper or to sum up an even when he was writing about a piece of fiction. Ryan and Zimmerelli mention this type of situation when they say, “many problems that second language writers encounter occur because their first language follows different rules.” Slowly I was able to work with him to explain the different way he could use quotations and the importance of them.
Through this session, it became clear to me that we, as writing consultants, must not only prepare ourselves for tutoring ESL students differently than other students, but that we also must treat every situation and student in a case by case fashion.
During my most recent session, a student with whom I had met a few times before to discuss more informal assignments came to see me with his paper. Although this student is more advanced in terms of his language skills than many of the students I have seen, I was amazed to find that he had absolutely no idea how to write an analytical paper. His assignment was to talk about one book with another book’s perspective in mind for his FYS class. In its essence, his assignment was the typical, "compare and contrast" the arguments of two different books style essay. With that said however, his paper lacked a thesis, a real argument and left me more confused about the topics of the two books than when I started. What was most interesting about this experience was that his mistakes were very different than any I had encountered before. This hit me immediately as I began to read his introduction paragraph, as I was surprised to find that it gave no indication of the argument of the paper, but was merely a summary of one of the books. Leigh Ryan and Lisa Zimmerelli speak to this type of problem in chapter five of their book, The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors, when they say, “Other cultures approach a problem by giving a detailed history first, information that other writers might find unnecessary.” Although caught off guard, I did my best not to discourage the student, but to work with him to help him understand the importance of an introduction paragraph to the paper and to explain to him that although it is ok to have a little bit of summary, there are also many other things that need to be included.
Another example of why this paper was unusual compared to the style of western writing I am used to was that, throughout his paper, he would interject questions in italics as if to provoke a certain thought from his audience. However, the problem with this was that the very questions he was proposing were the same ones he needed to be answering himself through his argument. Leigh Ryan and Lisa Zimmerelli explain that, the purpose of writing can be different for an ESL student, as they were often taught that writing had a different meaning or was supposed to bring forth a different type of reaction than what the western style of writing teaches. With this student’s paper, it seemed like it stemmed towards the “exaggeration and emotionalism” that Ryan and Zimmerelli mention as being typical. I discovered that the student was less trying to argue a particular point or claim than he was trying to retell certain details of the story in a more beautiful way, while forcing the reader to make the conclusions on their own. This is very similar to many of the concepts we discussed last class having to do with cultural backgrounds influencing a student’s style of writing. I think it is important to be aware of a student’s academic past to understand where their weaknesses might be in order to best help them improve.
With this said however, I was still very unsure of how to proceed, not wanting to offend the student, but also knowing that this was an unacceptable standard of organization and argumentation for almost all professors. I therefore, took Ryan and Zimmerelli’s advice that “culture determines acceptable ways of presenting information and in a tutoring session, acknowledging cultural differences often means explaining appropriate rhetorical patters for standard academic English.” Once I realized that the student was unaware of the mistakes he was making, we worked together to recreate the outline of his paper. Using ideas he already had written down, but not flushed out, and put them in a new order on a separate sheet of paper. In order to be able to do this, I definitely had to employ a more dialectic approach, constantly asking him questions and making conclusions based on what he had written and how he answered to then ask my next question. This way, despite the peculiarities of the paper, I was able to “respond first to the content and organization of their paper, as you would with any writer,” like Ryan and Zimmerelli suggest. This way, together we were able to manipulate his old paper into a new structure while preserving all his own ideas, just putting them in an order that made them into an argument, not just a bunch of statements.
Although that hurdle had been jumped, I soon discovered that we had another issue to deal with: he had some issues with fundamental aspects of an analytical paper. It turned out that the approach the student had been taught was very different from the western style we are used to. When he was making a claim about one of the books, he had summarized the events that had occurred in a few pages to use as support for the point he wished to make. Not only was there very little introduction or analysis of the events he paraphrased, but it also became apparent to me that he had not used a single quotation. When I asked him why he had chosen that method, I uncovered that he did not know how to use quotations for evidence in a paper or to sum up an even when he was writing about a piece of fiction. Ryan and Zimmerelli mention this type of situation when they say, “many problems that second language writers encounter occur because their first language follows different rules.” Slowly I was able to work with him to explain the different way he could use quotations and the importance of them.
Through this session, it became clear to me that we, as writing consultants, must not only prepare ourselves for tutoring ESL students differently than other students, but that we also must treat every situation and student in a case by case fashion.
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