Kathleen, post 2


This week we are considering issues that can arise when tutoring non-native English speakers—a subject that, as an instructor of international students, I find very pressing. The main trouble that I anticipate running into is the language of grammar. As pointed out in the Serving ESL Students article, they are likely to know the technicalities of English grammar above and beyond my own grasp on it. I have always gotten by with just testing to see if words sound right.
              So far I have helped one L2 student with her writing, and I believe it was productive. I suggested that she work on verb tenses, as almost all of her verbs were in the present tense. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to form the past tense—she just indicated a confusion regarding when to use the past tense. I found this challenging, as I felt this was a very basic question but knew there must be something complex behind her confusion, and I didn’t want to give an explanation that sounded condescending. I just pointed out that when discussing her childhood she should write in terms of the past, since she is no longer a child. In her next writing assignment she did make appropriate use of the past tense several times, so it seems we’re off to a good start together.

Comments

  1. UnknownJanuary 28, 2019 at 7:43 PM

    Hello Kathleen, thank you for this thoughtful post. I completely agree that issues of grammar seem likely to be those that most often occur in tutoring non-native English speakers. In shadowing Jennifer today during my Writing Center tutoring hours we worked with a PhD student from Jordan. His writing was very advanced, but he still had occasional issues with word tense and the absence of articles. I am interested to see whether this is the norm, or whether other issues will prove more prevalent for less advanced writers.

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  2. Consuelo Guayara SánchezJanuary 28, 2019 at 9:03 PM

    I found your comments very insightful. Having Spanish as my first language and thinking about my own struggles with writing where grammar errors, absence or sometimes unneeded articles may be a problem, I believe, a major difficulty in writing in a second language may be connected to not being able to clearly express your thoughts. Very often I find in my students’ writing either sentences that tend to be “dense” or sentences that do not convey enough information leading to “unclear meaning.” Perhaps this lack of clarity goes beyond the phase of “translating” your thoughts from the other language.

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