I was an undergraduate student at Queens College in the late 1990s when remedial instruction was eliminated in four-year CUNY colleges.  One measure to alleviate the rigidity of the new policy was Prelude to Success, the program that allowed students needing remediation to be conditionally admitted to four-year schools.  These students’ determination to succeed in their first crucial semester at Queens was truly admirable.  Working closely with such students, I saw a vast majority of them, ESL or not, successfully exiting remediation and becoming full-time students at Queens. 

At Baruch, ESL students receive strong support in handling the curriculum of English and literature courses.  There are now several sections of Composition and Intro. to Literature courses (2100 and 2150) designed specifically for ESL students who attend a one-hour tutorial every week as a part of their class.  It was interesting and extremely rewarding for me to lead these tutorials as a Writing Center Consultant last semester.  This current semester I learned about the existence of 2800 “T” (Great Works of Literature with a Tutorial).  In fact, a big part of my Writing Fellow work now is 1 ½ – hour weekly meetings with 2800 “T” students.  Even though the population of this class can hardly be called ESL – there has been a registration glitch, and many students who don’t need the tutorial rushed to get into this section because it was open.  In my next post(s), I’ll gladly share my difficulties and pleasures in leading this unusual tutorial.  For now, I want to dwell on the place of ESL students in classes across disciplines. 

Transfer students from foreign schools who “fall through the cracks” and enroll in regular English and other courses with intensive reading and writing; freshmen who struggle in exhausting summer Immersion classes; continuing students who are making gradual progress in learning English – they all find their way into classrooms where they want to “sound American” and eliminate all grammar problems that prevent them from succeeding academically and socially.  They may be afraid to speak in class; they may want to get rid of their accents in speech and writing; they often simplify their thoughts because they can’t find the right words to articulate the full complexity of their thinking. They receive papers with many corrections and sadly agree that they don’t deserve to get above “B” because their “grammar is bad.” They run to the Writing Center or SACC for help, often hoping to get their papers cleaned up and polished.  They are used to hearing “Could you say that again?” or “I’m not sure I understand what you mean by ….”. 

Whether we set out to teach these students in our classrooms or lead workshops for them, we can’t overlook these interconnected issues.   I hope we can all exchange some constructive approaches to dealing with ESL writers and speakers.  I just want to share a few strategies that I found particularly useful: finding and praising a strong point in the writer’s/speaker’s thinking, resisting the urge to eliminate original formulations that do not “sound American,” and finally helping students see that the abundance of red marks in their papers does not mean that they make an abundant number of mistakes — it simply means they make a few recurrent ones. In my work as a tutor, I found it very useful to use a particular color for each type of error.  This way the student knew that he/she had 2 or 3 problem areas and not 20 or 30. 

One particular article has been especially helpful in my work with ESL students: “Editing Line by Line” by Cynthia Linville (ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors.  Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth, eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2004.  84-93.).  Linville explains that there are “[s]ix error types that are treatable and are often frequent or serious in ESL college compositions”; these include subject-verb agreement, verb tense, verb form, singular/plural noun endings, word form, sentence structure.  When we focus on what’s treatable and teachable, we will help students to learn English more efficiently, build their confidence and preserve their unique voices. 

In my spare time (well, in my spare *work* time), I am working as a writer for a Japanese-English dictionary. I have been involved with this series of ESL dictionary projects for a number of years now, and although I have done two English-Japanese learners’ dictionaries, it is my first time to work on a Japanese-English dictionary. The work can be tedious sometimes, but it is an interesting experience.

The writing of ESL dictionaries is significantly different from the writing of the English dictionaries that most of the readers here may be familiar with (OED, etc.) in the sense that it involves a lot of cross-linguistic (mental) activities. Especially, for this Japanese-English dictionary, the editors keep emphasizing to us how we must provide real-life expressions, those that people actually use, rather than the literal translation of the given word that traditional Japanese-English dictionaries have been criticised for listing uselessly. In this sense, this work is aiming to shape up as an organized collection of expressions, not a list of words or grammatical explanations about the words.

To give you a very simple example, for the entry that typically stands for ‘stomach’, I am to first come up with expressions in JAPANESE that we actually use, including ‘stomach is empty’. Of course, no one says ‘my stomach is empty’ in English. Then, I provide the equivalent expressions that we actually use in ENGLISH, ‘I am hungry’. Furthermore, when you want to say you are very hungry, in Japanese you say something like ‘stomach is very empty’, which should be expressed in English as something like ‘I am very hungry’, ‘I am really hungry’, or ‘I am starving’, which might be more ‘real’.

Also, you might have noticed that in the Japanese that I provided above, ‘stomach is empty’, there is no determiner. It is absent in Japansese. In Japanese, you tend do omit personal pronouns, whereas English requires one; when you say ‘I went to school’ in English, they say ‘went to school’, which is usually enough for the hearer to know that the person who went to school is the speaker. Using of a personal pronoun is always possible but, when you used it redundantly, the sentence becomes less natural. Hence, in the dictionary I work on, I am expected to omit the personal pronouns in the Japanese sentences wherever I can, to make it more ‘real’.

Working on these things makes me remember the old days when I studied English at school. In the translation exercises, which were a lot, we always had to translate everything in full: when there is an ‘I’, you have to always spell out the ‘I’. As a result, all the Japanese sentences translated from English were really weird. I think it was part of the reason why, in our mind, ‘School English’ was never real English and no matter how well you know School English, you never feel like actually knowing the real English.

I hope this new dictionary, a collection of ‘real’ English expressions that I deliver from my experience using the real English here, will help the students a bit with their long endeavor to acquire communication skills in the ‘real’ English.