Alina Vamanu, Blog Post #2

This week, I have been particularly interested in the topic of serving ESL students. The article we read offers valuable suggestions and advice to Writing Center employees tutoring international and immigrant students. Making these students feel comfortable and welcome by giving the Center a multicultural and international feel sounds like a good start. Also, it is important to pay attention to their linguistic and cultural differences, and as the text suggests, one can accomplish this goal by "ask[ing] lots of good questions rather than arriving at possibly pre-mature conclusions about their personalities, rhetorics, or cultures" (1). In other words, writing tutors need to bracket their assumptions about various groups of people coming from outside of the U.S. and demonstrate a willingness to learn from their students, as much as the latter will probably learn from them.

For me, working with international and immigrant students has been extremely fulfilling. Back in Romania, I learned English as a non-native speaker and benefited tremendously from having language, literature, and culture classes with British and American lecturers both in high school and in college. I also taught English language and literature to Romanian undergraduates. This experience gave me a good sense of what it feels like not only to teach ESL students, but actually to be one of them. In the U.S., I was an international student myself, before deciding to immigrate and make this country my new home. As a result, I have always resonated well with international and immigrant students. With some, I share linguistic similarities. For instance, Romanian and Spanish are very close. Our vocabularies and grammatical rules are similar. Romanians and speakers of Spanish (whether they come from Spain or various Latin American countries) often understand each other when they speak, even in the absence of prior exposure to the other language. With other students, I share the experience of studying in an English-language university and going through the process of adjusting to a different institutional and cultural environment.

This is a topic of great interest to me and I look forward to talking about it in class. I was wondering whether there are any resources for writing tutors who are themselves non-native or bilingual English speakers? I think it would be interesting to explore possible similarities and differences between native and non-native writing tutors.

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