Week 3


I’m so glad to see such wonderful and insightful posts from you all about working with international and ESL students, because it’s something I’ve also been thinking about a lot in terms of some of my ESL students in my Interpretation of Literature class, who I think could really benefit from Writing Center tutelage! One student’s reading responses, in particular, embody many of the grammar/syntax issues we’ve been reading and talking about — the ideas are there, but her clarity of expression is impeded by the difficulties of this language. I can only imagine how incredibly frustrating it must feel to know what you want to say, but be struggling with how to say it (I look like half a semester of Italian in college, but dropped it because it was too hard, lol; non-native English speakers don’t have that luxury). 

Another international student’s reading responses, on the other hand, demonstrate the ability to put a sentence together in a way that makes sense—but I can tell that there is a basic level of reading comprehension that is not happening. She can read a passage, but miss the ideas behind that passage (For example, we just read Alexander Chee’s essay “Girl,” in which the narrator dresses up in drag for a night; the student thought the narrator was female, even though the essay makes it very clear, to me, that he is not. I'm not sure how much of this misunderstanding has to do with social/cultural differences, versus missing the nuances in the text). This makes me think about proper grammar as mimicry—not necessarily an indicator of comprehension/critical thought. Not a virtue, just a skill.

I guess this rambling is all just to say: We may have a set of expectations about what non-native English speakers might be struggling with, based on what we know to be common. But it's important to keep in mind that one size does not fit all when it comes to what any student might need. This is all just part of why the student-centered approach we've been discussing is so key. 



Comments

  1. KyleSeptember 11, 2019 at 11:59 AM

    Your entry is making me think so much about Cummins’s concepts of CALPS and BICS from The Writing Center Resource Manual. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is how much CALPS functions as something of a second language for native English speaking students in our classes (requiring them to “translate” their thoughts into academic prose). Cummins notes that many international students have a strong grasp on CALPS in their native languages (and some in English in their disciplines). However, for many of my non-native English speaking students, I can sense that academic writing presents them with, really, a third language to learn. And in discussion-based classes that also rely heavily on writing like Interpretation of Literature, these students are being called on to tap into both CALPS and BICS all the time, often having to switch between them. I can’t imagine the difficulty of that! Your response is helping challenge me to think of better ways to help my students strengthen their mastery of both CALPS and BICS within our class together.

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