Adventures in E.S.L.

My experience with ESL, or English as a second language tutoring to date has been fabulous-it’s really something I’ve fallen in love with. The staff member Bruno (not actual name) I have been set up with is from West Africa and speaks a dialect of French. This is a great match for me because I do have some background in that language in particular. From the first moment Bruno entered the neat, new, room and organized his papers I could tell that he was ready and eager to learn. His broad smile and sense of humor bridged the gap of our differences easily.

The first and foremost thing I initiated before we dove into the workbook he was equipped with was basic conversation. Here my understanding of learning a language came into play. While his sentences were basic at best, I remember the frustration of understanding conversation and not being able to respond. Listening generally comes first, and then comes speech. He told me a little about himself, and talked about his family, all the while eager to begin the workbook- perhaps I thought conversing put him outside of his comfort zone.

The workbook exercises that we began were basic. We practiced together with prepositions: under, over, behind, below, next to, …etc. He seemed comfortable with this and I had him draw pictures to illustrate the ideas he was learning from the book. “Draw a turtle under a tree,” I would read, and he would sit and ponder for a moment or two but presently draw a turtle under a tree. Before I knew it, it was time to go and I wrapped up the session by asking him about animals he knew of. Shyness forgotten Bruno carried on for quite some time about African animals he couldn’t find an English equivalent for, that sounded both thrilling and terrifying like a creature that might leap out of the game board in Jumanji.

These sessions are much more based on learning the language of English, rather than utilizing it, and Bruno offered different concerns to me  than an ESL college student might present. Mosher, Granroth, and Hicks suggest in their article Creating a Common Ground with ESL writers, “to avoid becoming the teacher in our writing conferences; we would rather be the listening ear. Greater directness, we fear, could com- promise our goal of creating a better writer through talk”. I think this statement sounds good in theory when applied to any ESL student but might be much more difficult to implement if the ESL student is shy or reluctant to speak. I will try to continue to engage Bruno in conversation he finds interesting, (I’d love to hear more about those crazy animals) and I think that he and the other staff members engaged in the program, are incredibly trusting and dedicated people to devote as much time as some of them do to an entirely student operated organization.

First Consultation: Katie Oberkircher’s Psychology Paper

I’ve never written, read, or encountered an academic Psychology essay before my midterm consultation with Katie Oberkircher, and yet here I was, required to comment upon and suggest improvements on an essay written about just that. Since her paper is a piece from her class which is entitled First Year Seminar: Friendship, one might expect her writing to be expository literary analysis like many seminars, at least that’s what I expected. But no, she informed me, “All we’ve read so far are handouts and packets, scientific studies on friendship. We haven’t read one book [novel] all semester”. As I set out to give a helpful consultation I kept this in mind, along with the important fact that a professor from the Psychology department would be working from a very different criteria than the English or Art History professors who taught me in my First Year Seminars. The consultation was to be a lesson in a new academic discourse, for both Katie and me, and I knew such a new experience would mean the academic context of the essay which is addressed in Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions by Elizabeth Wardle and Douglas Downs would be important to take into account in the consultation. The assignment sheet in particular was also to be an invaluable tool in bridging the requirements of Katie’s professor, Anna Kendall’s Assignment Sheet Mystery was to help me help her balance and blend these demands with her raw writing skills to produce a polished essay. Finally, Summer Smith’s essay The Genre of the End Comment: Conventions in Teacher Responses to Student Writing was especially vital in aiding me to concretely communicate with Katie the nature of my suggestions and commentary in writing.

Context is paramount to any written academic work; an assertion that Downs and Wardle bring up and discuss in their article. Academic context too becomes essential in Katie’s conflicting ideas for how her paper should be formed. Downs and Wardle refer specifically to the mode in which this context is understood as “universal educated discourse” a phrase, which indicates the different voice, needed and employed in writing on any topic from biology to banking. To write in this discourse one’s argument must be in accord with the discourse prescribed to a particular academic field. However, I noticed Katie’s thesis lacked a decisive argument and instead was rather broad in its statement that is as follows, “ Both Sullivan and Harris show the consequences of the preadolescent environment affect social development, but Harris concentrates on how different aspects of the preadolescent environment affect social development, while Sullivan centers around individual social growth”. I mentioned my thought to Katie in the consultation, suggesting that she strengthen the thesis with her own assertion on the contrast between the two authors she was analyzing. However, she informed me that she had already met with her professor, and that this professor had said she didn’t really need a thesis to speak of. Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions makes the assertion that, “If writing cannot be separated from content, then scholarly writing cannot be separated from reading”(Wardle & Downs, 555). If all academic writing requires discussion of equally academic reading to be successful, analysis is inherently required of the writer. Having read the Wardle and Downs article I recognized that not all fields require to be structured in the same manner, but that an argument would be beneficial to any analytical essay. It was difficult for me to see how we should proceed without this so, I hearkened back to the assignment sheet, the concrete written outline of what the teacher wants from her students, and it seemed the only logical and valid place to begin.

The assignment sheet can be useful to ascertain whether or not the written work at the end of drafting is written in appropriate academic form and discourse specific to the field.  Anna Kendall’s Assignment Sheet Mystery suggests that really the assignment sheet is an important genre of academic writing in universities, and worthy of notice. The St. Martin’s handbook asserts, “a discussion of strategy words will guide students to a more complex understanding of how their essays will be evaluated” (St. Martin’s 96). Together Katie and I followed this suggestion, looking for action words in the assignment sheet text, and we noticed the presence of the words compare, analyze, and contrast. The essential word analyze clued Katie in that a more concrete thesis might be useful in order to fully analyze the texts she discusses, and to fully compare and contrast the authors in an interesting and intellectual way.

The next facet of the paper I addressed was the organization. I know from firsthand experience that structuring a comparison paper can be one of the trickier tasks in any kind of writing. While Katie’s topic sentences were for the most part very clear and well written, her paragraphs often strayed from their original purpose. I suggested that Katie make herself a reverse outline, a tip I learned from one of my own appointments in the Writing Center. I also referred her to Glossing Your Ideas: Focusing/Connecting Ideas a page on Writer’s Web that suggests the writer ask themselves essential questions, which determine the focus of a paragraph and greater argument of the paper.

End comments are something I’ve had a lot of experience with in my short background in Creative Writing, but have always struggled with. However I never really found myself a very strong writer of end comments – they made me feel uncomfortable, and like I was passing a final judgment on the work of the writer. Daunted by writing another, I was delighted when I read an article dealing with this concern deeming the end comment its own genre. Summer Smith’s The Genre of the End Comment: Conventions in Teacher Responses to Student Writing. Smith asserts that this is the most important text a teacher or consultant can write to help or hinder a writer. To avoid judging the content of a paper I shied from what Smith qualified as a “primary genre” or a response that is only a few brief statements, which in her studies she found were the most judgmental of all. Instead I strove to write a comment she qualified as “secondary genre”. Smith says this genre “usually begins with positive evaluation, moves to negative evaluation and coaching, and ends either with coaching or positive evaluation”(Smith, 250). This example still however seemed to me a little brief and lacking in specifics. I attempted to merge my own ideas with those of Smith to produce an end comment that cited in detail the parts of Katie’s paper such as the thesis and organization which I wanted to comment upon.

Katie was grateful for my commentary, and in summary I feel the consultation went well. The readings, especially the three discussed above were completely helpful to me in Katie’s consultation. I recognize that every case is different though, and that the variety of reading we have engaged in will serve as a veritable mine of information as I approach new consultations. Often our readings and activities for class address extreme situations, as in the case of our Training for Tough Tutorials videos. However, I think in this way we are a lot like paramedics in training. Just like any paramedic all we can do as consultants is prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and do all in our power to help the writer, pledging ourselves to aid their pursuit of writing. 

Keeping Professional, Staying Objective

Finally, my first opportunity to shadow! A blonde girl dressed head to toe in pink was our first client to date. As the appointment proceeded I noticed from their talk of Edna Ponteiller that the writer was creating an essay on The Awakening by Kate Chopin, which happens to have changed my life and is one of my favorite books. I am a very talkative person, and while we discuss often in class the difficulties of being a consultant, I think that the apprentice side of the arrangement can be equally challenging in remembering to be quiet and observant. I was positively bursting during the session to share my insight on the novel, but I held my own and watched instead.

Ernest Hemingway said, “Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking about what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe”. I am glad I did somehow find the patience to watch and listen. Our writer was concerned primarily with the demands of her teacher using repeatedly the words “weird” and “crazy” to describe his methods. She admitted that she didn’t understand the teacher’s style, and that she was frustrated that there are, “So many ways to write”.

The writing consultant immediately asked to see the assignment sheet, a helpful move, which I noticed, was strongly recommended by Anna Kendall in her article The Assignment Sheet Mystery when a student flounders with writing for a different mode than accustomed to, or grappling with the demands of a teacher. The assignment to me did seem overbearing and a little ridiculous for a college professor to assign, for example he required a quotation in the second sentence of the paragraphs, the consultant was respectful of the teacher’s opinion and didn’t join in to criticize the professor, as a consultant fell into the trap of doing in Training for Tough Tutorials: The Friend about a reluctant client. Instead the consultant kept her cool and professional attitude giving her input within the boundaries of the assignment.

Towards the end of the consultations the writer said, “I think I might try to shoot him” I froze in my seat “(dramatic pause)…. an email” I swear to you, that I really for a moment thought that one writer’s angst might have resulted in a horror. But no, the consultants professional demeanor must have been a positive influence for instead the writer endeavored to better understand her professor and polish her writing.