Interlanguage (or, What We Can Learn from our ESL Clients)

I remember the first time I sat down with an ESL client in the writing center. I had finished my tutoring observations just a few days before, and I felt like I was still learning the ropes of tutoring native speakers. So when our receptionist walked over to my desk to ask if I was available for an ESL client who wanted a drop-in appointment, I remember waffling. Our writing center director had encouraged us not to take on clients we felt we weren't prepared to help, but in addition to feeling sorry for the young man (he looked really desperate, I recall, standing by the front desk rolling his essay into a long tube, flattening it out, rolling it up again), I figured, Hey, I've got to start sometime, right?

The client (I'll call him Samir) was from Saudi Arabia, and clearly as nervous as I was. I remember how he hesitated when I asked him to read his paper aloud. "I'm not so good at English," he said, in a heavily-accented voice. "Maybe you should read it."

My non-directive tutoring instincts kicked in: Did this client want me to take responsibility for his paper? I looked around the room, hoping a more experienced tutor would be free and could step in, but everyone was busy.

So I took a deep breath and pushed the paper aside. I asked Samir to tell me about where he was from. He was hesitant at first; he kept looking down at the paper, obviously wondering why we weren't getting on with things, but he trusted me, the tutor, enough to play along. He told me that this was his first semester in the U.S. He was an undergraduate, a freshman. He'd studied English in Saudi Arabia, he said, but his exam scores hadn't been high enough to place him into the mainstream first-year writing class, English 101, so he was in English 100, our university's basic writing class.

My tutor-senses tingled as Samir mentioned his basic writing class. It seemed to me that his self-esteem had taken quite a blow by being placed in what he no doubt perceived as a remedial course. "Were you a good student in Saudi Arabia?" I asked, and Samir nodded, smiling for the first time as he told me about how proud his family was that he'd graduated with nearly perfect marks and had been accepted to a university in the U.S.

"So tell me what this paper is about," I remember saying to Samir then. He explained that the essay (which was for English 100) was supposed to be about an important event in his life. He'd chosen to write about his father's death, from cancer, two years earlier.

I could see how much Samir cared about his topic as he described the experience to me: Clearly, this was not a disenfranchised student looking for a tutor to edit and proofread his paper. This was someone who really wanted to tell readers about his father and what it was like to lose a parent at such a young age.

After about ten minutes of talking, I slid the paper back toward Samir. "Why don't you read this to me?" I asked again. "Go as slow as you need to. I really want to hear this, in your voice."

And Samir started to read.

I tell this story because it gave me my first inkling that I'd been thinking about ESL clients in the wrong way. Even though Samir was from another country and English was not his first language, he'd come to the writing center with many of the same anxieties and emotional hang-ups as native-speaking American students: He was embarrassed by being labeled a "bad writer," even more embarrassed to need a tutor, and afraid both of those things meant he wasn't really cut out for college. What Samir needed wasn't so terribly different from what any other writing center client needed. He needed a tutor who would get to know him as a person, who would take the time to draw him out, who would work to create a friendly environment, and who would patiently support him in his development as a writer.

This is the point Ilona Leki makes in "Before the Conversation," when she reminds us that we do ESL students a disservice as tutors if we paint them all with a broad brush. Leki overviews some categories of ESL writers, pointing out the different challenges faced by, say, an ESL student who has grown up in the U.S. and a student like Samir who has only recently come here for college, but more importantly to my mind is her emphasis on the individuality of ESL clients, which our ethnocentric worldview may cause us to overlook:

"There is also a tendency among humans to see their own social and cultural group as highly nuanced and differentiated but to be less able to fully grasp that all social and cultural groups are equally nuanced and differentiated...[T]he most effective way for writing center tutors to experience these nuances firsthand is to take advantage of the visits of these multilingual, multicultural individuals to the writing center and show interest in their home language, country, or culture by engaging them in the kind of small talk that usually accompanies tutoring sessions, and so get to know them one by one" (13).

Too often as tutors (and writing center directors), we see the ESL tutoring session as a wholly different beast from a native-speaker session. We take the time to get to know our native-speaking clients; we don't automatically assume that their reticence to read their papers aloud signals a desire to push the work of writing or editing off onto us, the tutor. ESL clients become one homogeneous group, characterized primarily by their linguistic Otherness.

As the tutors in my practicum course begin to study theories of ESL tutoring, what I want most to convey to them, beyond theories of SLA (which I think our incredibly valuable and worth learning for any writing teacher, by the way), is the importance of treating ESL clients as clients.

I want my tutors-in-training not to Other ESL clients to the point that they see the tutoring session as a one-way exchange. That was how I looked at Samir in our first encounter: Not only was he a writing center client, which likely meant I knew more about writing than he did, he was also an international student and a non-native speaker, which meant he needed my understanding of American culture and the English language. And of course Samir did need those things from me. Yet over time, as Samir came back to the writing center each week that fall semester and through the spring term as well, I began to see that he had a lot to teach me, too. He had been places and experienced cultures that were as foreign to me as the United States was to him.

Looking back, I think some of the most valuable learning that took place during my sessions with Samir really didn't have much to do with writing at all. It had a lot more to do with two people from different parts of the globe sitting down, one-on-one, and sharing their stories.

Leki, Ilona. "Before the Conversation: A Sketch of Some Possible Backgrounds, Experiences, and Attitudes Among ESL Students Visiting a Writing Center." ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. 2nd ed. Eds. Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. Boynton/Cook: Portsmouth, NH, 2009. 1-17.