Pervasive And Unconscious Xenophobia: The Downsides

Pervasive And Unconscious Xenophobia:
The Downsides

Working With ESL Students And Writing Across Borders was a film about ESL students struggling to meet expectations in the United States says a lot about what it is like to be in a foreign land. More importantly, it talked about how the processes and products of writing in other cultures is a lot different than that of the United States.

The film used examples to talk about how some countries had less linear structure. It also talked about how the main-point (the thesis) doesn’t always come at the beginning, but rather at the end or in the middle. I find that Korean students as a lot of questions about putting main ideas up front, and they seem to know enough that American academia expects them to put their main points up in the thesis, but sometimes they aren’t quite sure how to organized their paragraphs and sentences. This reveals to me how non-linear other languages can be. It’s clear to me that these clients that I work with sincerely believe that they should build up to their main ideas rather than putting them out front, but as someone who learned to write while working on their high-school newspaper and learned AP style formatting, that is almost counter intuitive. But, I understand that this is a mere cultural difference, and that they are no less and no more falsely indoctrinated into a baseless construct any more than I am.

The challenge though, is helping them preserve their cultural identity in their writing while also helping them to meet the expectations and demands of writing at an American university. When in doubt, I try to help them meet expectations. Even non-ESL students have to adhere to certain standards of grammar, structure, content and length in their academic writing, and it wouldn’t be fair to ask less of the ESL student. Even when a writer is limited by certain parameters, they are allowed to shape themselves between them and each writer has a unique opportunity to express themselves in a way that is original and authentic. The job of the consultant in my view is to help the ESL student do just that.

This film did a lot to help me articulate an acknowledgement of this phenomenon, and it certainly has helped me to be more aware of these cultural differences as I work with students from many lands.

I think it is worth mentioning that doing these posts later in the semester has allowed me to reflect more about how I have applied what I have learned in the classroom to my work as a consultant. Does procrastination pay off? It offers a lot of consequences, obstacles and frustration, but so does vigorous preparation and forethought. Both procrastination and forethought offer different consequences and different rewards, and by procrastinating I am a merely in-tune with things. My cultural identity as a caucasian BoHo slacker is reflected in my writing process, and I think we should embrace that.