Consulting with International Students
How many
times have you struggled to explain a difficult concept of the English language
to International students, such as why we say “report on” rather than “report
in,” or why we park in a driveway and drive in a parkway? We tell them that’s
simply the way it is, and there’s no logical reason why because it’s English.
Other times, the waythey’ve written something doesn’t quite make sense to us in
English, so we tell them to write it a different way because, frankly, it’s
“wrong.” This is a problem because it probably sounded correct in their native language
when they wrote it; they just have trouble translating it the right way into
written English.
Often, we
tutors might think the best solution is to give our clients an example of how we
ourselves would write it and let them model their own writing after our given
example. The problem with this, however, is that some students may just take
the advice at face value and not actually learn from it. They will simply just
take the tutor’s word for it and then move on. But isn’t the point of a writing
center to help students become better writers so they can correct their own
errors without our guidance?
First of
all, it’s not usually a good idea to tell our international students their writing/English
is wrong. That can be very
detrimental to the learning process. Many international students have expressed
how they feel when they’re told their writing is wrong or bad: they already
feel like outsiders, so it is very discouraging to be told they have to go back
and revise after working so hard on a paper. As tutors, we should try to steer
away from the directive approach. All students will see is a paper full of
errors, but the beauty of the content, their thought processes, may be
overlooked.
When we
come across a sentence that might have correct punctuation, but confusing
syntax and diction, our common reaction is to try to re-write it. We’ll stare
at it for a few minutes until we can say, “I think you meant to write it like this.” Sometimes, the student will
simply nod and agree, because we are the ones with more writing experience. But
what is the student going to take away from this session? A correctly-written
paper, yes, but no knowledge of how to become a good writer.
A better
way to overcome this roadblock might be for us to, first, put the pencil down.
We should try to become a listener
and a guide for our clients, letting
them explain their original thought processes behind that sentence. We can ask,
“How would you have said this in their native language?” and let them think
about it and either voice their answer out loud or write it down. Then, we
should ask them to break down that sentence and translate it literally into English. This should help
demonstrate the idea they were trying to get across. Then, we can take that
literal translation and show them how to reconstruct it in the English
language’s sentence structure. For example, we might pull out the subject and
the verb, put them in the right order and verb tense, and explain how English
tends to follow the structure of subject-verb-object. This would provide a
visual representation of the English language. In addition, if they try to use
a word that isn’t commonly used in that context in English, we can explain that
concept to them and give them some examples of what word or words we might choose instead. All of this
hopefully will help alleviate some of the miscommunication that can occur in
these sessions and help the consultation run more smoothly for both parties involved.
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