ELL week

This week’s readings came at a good time for me, since I had my first two consultations with ELL students. I noticed a few of the things we’d discussed in class and read about happening in these sessions, and I also made some mistakes I want to learn from. 

Powers’ article was really powerful (no pun intended) for me, and was the first ELL text I feel like I got a lot out of. I think this was because she acknowledged the difficulty and--honestly--impossibility of applying one-size-fits-all tactics to such a diverse group of people. I found it mind-blowing to realize that our open-ended questioning may not be helpful for an ELL student who doesn’t actually have the answer. I think she really challenged me to be more aware and sensitive to the situation ELL students are in, and to not assume linguistic or cultural knowledge that these students may not have, and to embrace the role of “cultural informant,” both for our ELL writers and our native-speakers. Our readings this week helped me further realize that thought WHAT we do is the same with every writer, HOW we do it can differ drastically. 

My first appointment with an ELL student was along the lines of what I expected to encounter. The writer had a short interview essay with lots of grammatical errors. It was due the next day, and he still needed to ask two more questions of his interviewee to meet the assignment requirements. I tried to focus on higher order concerns first, of course, but I noticed that the writer didn’t want to have a conversation about these, and would instead just nod and say he understood, and move on to grammar. So, we went line-by-line basically for the rest of the session. 

I feel fairly good about how I handled the grammar portion--looking for patterns and helping the student find other areas that needed improvement, always naming the error and talking about--as simply as possible--why we needed to fix it. There were really consistently the same errors throughout. I could tell the writer was frustrated with his grammar errors, though, sometimes expressing how he knew what he wanted to say and that he just couldn’t say it. I wish I knew ways to help ELL students feel less frustrated in those situations. 

An action I wish I could take back, though, was a “correction” I gave him to make. He had interviewed another ELL student in his 122 class, and he had quoted him as saying he had broken his “leg fingers” playing soccer. I asked him questions about this, and realized they had come up with this to describe toes--the missing English word they didn’t know. As I talked this over with him, I explained the word was toes, and he changed his essay. I almost stopped to explain that he didn’t need to change it, and that it wasn’t necessarily wrong, and that he could explain somewhere else in his paper that he and his fellow student had come up with this word to describe toes… but I was stopped by the fact that we had trouble communicating verbally, and I wondered if he would understand my caveat. If I told him both that the word was “wrong” and “right,” would I actually be helping him or just confusing him? It was an interesting conundrum. 

Overall, this was definitely ELL week for me, and I’m glad I’ve had a few experiences with ELL writers under my belt to start building my skills for these sessions.