Many clients in the Writing Center (about 55-60%) are Non-Native Speakers.  Sessions with such writers can sometimes be frustrating for tutors.  If you feel any serious anxiety about tutoring people whose cultures and languages differ from your own, the ESL Specialist Tutor can work with you to overcome your concerns. 

Here are some tips to think about before tutoring ESL students.

Be aware of common sentence-level errors in ESL writing
Listen carefully and holistically
Ask for clarification
Look for patterns
Familiarize yourself with the language of those learning English 
Help out with pronunciation
Don’t be afraid to laugh at some interlanguage mistakes
Use your own knowledge of foreign languages to solve problems

Be aware of common sentence-level errors in ESL writing 
It is somewhat dangerous to attempt to group the kinds of errors that ESL writers make, primarily because the categories are so slippery.  Nor is it fair to assume that every ESL speaker with have the same problems.  Research, however, has shown that the following are areas in which dialect interference is most common:

• subject-verb agreement
• pronoun-antecedent agreement
• use of prepositions
• collective count, and noncount nouns
• verb endings/tenses
• verbs with particles
• articles (noun markers)

The ESL Specialist is available to help all other tutors with the recognition of these errors and useful methods of working with ESL clients. There are also handouts available in the Writing Center and our website to help tutors and ESL students in the above areas.

Listen carefully and holistically 
This applies to all clients, but especially to ESL clients who may take a meandering route to get to a point.  Some papers that ESL writers produce will exhibit a less linear, more circuitous approach to problem solving than is normally expected in American academia.  Introductions in such papers may appear weak, lacking those direct assertions that can quickly catch a reader’s interest.  Paradoxically, other papers by ESL writers may be characterized by a degree of exaggerated assertiveness that a native writer would find discomforting.  Not all cultures argue in the same structural conventions, tone and voice.

Cultures express ideas using different organizational patterns and types of support, which results, often, in a grammatically correct piece of writing with an idiosyncratic development.  Be sensitive to these kinds of cultural differences and try to help the writer understand the differences between American academic expectations for writing and the expectations of his or her own culture.   Try to help the client shape his or her ideas into what is expected in American academia with out changing what the client is trying to say.

Ask for clarification 
Again, this applies to all clients.  But what might make perfect sense to you as a native speaker might not make sense to a non-native speaker.  And vice versa. Sometimes, you may have to ask several times for clarification.  You should always try to reword your questions if the client is not understanding.

Look for patterns 
For example, a Japanese client might put a proper article before a stand-alone countable noun (A book on the table), but might not put an article in front of a modified noun (Red book on round table).  If you can recognize a pattern of errors, point it out in one or two places and have the client find the rest.  This way the client can find the problem on his or her own in the future.

Familiarize yourself with the language of those learning English 
In other words, learn how to explain grammar in terms clients are used to hearing.  Many times, native speakers know when something is right or wrong in English by the way it sounds, but they can’t explain the problem in grammatical terms.  ESL students learning the language are familiar with grammatical terms and many times feel comfortable talking on this level.

Help out with pronunciation 
In some cases, you should let the client watch you physically make the sound.  For example, many ESL client have trouble pronouncing /0/ (thick) and/o/ (thin) sounds in English.  The sound is made in almost the same way as /t/ and /d/ except that at the start of the sound, the tip of the tongue is between the teeth instead of behind the back of the top front teeth.  It is almost impossible not to pronounce /0/ and /o/ if the tongue is between the teeth.  If clients can see the physical aspects of making a sound, they are more likely to remember it.

Don’t be afraid to laugh at some interlanguage mistakes 
ESL students would much rather see their mistakes cause a smile than disapproval.

Use your own knowledge of foreign languages to solve problems 
For example, a native Spanish-speaking student might have written the first part of this sentence as “a native Espanish-espeaking estudent.”  In Spanish, words with s and another consonant at the beginning are preceded by e.  This example is admittedly a stretch, but it has shown up in writing on more than one occasion.  Another example of a situation where this kind of knowledge can help you is with Japanese students.  Japanese sentence structure is SOV (subject-object-verb) and a Japanese student may write an English sentence this way.