ESL thoughts

This was a pretty big learning week for me... for one, I had my first sessions on my own with ESL students - 4 in a row in fact. Then we coincidentally had these readings in class about ESL students, plus the video. I've definitely learned a lot... first of all, one thing I noticed in my sessions is that ESL students are fantastic writers. In just about every case I had this week, the student wrote better than they spoke, and wrote with great vocabulary and coherence. Their ideas were conveyed in their writing accurately, and they wrote really good papers, better than most ENL students I've seen. The only issue was grammar. I know I'm kind of kicking a dead horse there... but I suppose I thought that ESL students would have their meaning lost in the grammar-fray when writing papers, and was pleasantly surprised to see that that was not true. At least not in the few cases I saw this week. Another thing I saw was that once I corrected a few instances of a recurring grammar error, and gave them the best explanation for the correction I could muster, the ESL writers very quickly picked up on the mistake and were able to correct all of the rest of the instances of it themselves. After all this new information this week, I think I have a better understanding of ESL writers, how they write, why they write how they do, and how best to go about helping them.

Another thing I wanted to say was to respond to Mike's post. I think he made a very interesting point when he said that we don't cite sources just to give credit, but to enhance learning. That's absolutely an important part of citing, and I think a lot of people forget that sometimes. Granted, not too many of us read a peer's paper and then copy their works cited page so that they can have a little bit of weekend reading... but in the academic community as a whole, citing does enhance learning, and allows us to utilize resources we might not have found on our own, enabling us to do our own research and learn even more.