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.