Responding to Listening to the World

Reading Helen Fox’s Listening to the World has been a challenging experience for me. I don’t mean that I’m having a hard time getting through the text, but that it is genuinely challenging me as I read. Writing from a personal perspective, rather than more academic/objective position, Fox invites her readers to see and feel things the way she does. I feel like I’m making the same realizations and having my eyes opened in the same way. Her approach is an effective one, and seems to emulate the context-rich style that many of her students favor. Other academics have written on this subject, but it took Fox’s personal anecdotes to really drive home the difficulties faced by ESL students. It’s one thing to talk about the implicit cultural bias that manifests itself in professors’ (and tutors’) corrections of student text. It’s another thing entirely to make the reader aware of how they themselves are guilty of that same bias.

Reading about Surya’s difficulties, I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. If even the well-intentioned criticism of caring professors felt like “a blow to the head,” how might my own criticism have made ESL students feel? Have I contributed to their feelings of frustration and embarrassment? I can only hope that my suggestions don’t come off as condescending or arrogant. I’m well aware that I can become frustrated when I can’t get an ESL student to understand how part of their text might be confusing. Even though we are communicating in the same language, it feels like there’s an insurmountable barrier to understanding between us. My frustration is with myself, because I feel like I’m failing them as a tutor. But what if they pick up on my frustration, and think that I’m frustrated with them? Or that I blame them for not understanding? Do they think I think they’re stupid? Have I made people resent me? Fox’s goal was to get her readers to re-evaluate their approaches to working with ESL students, but she couldn’t have predicted the deluge of self-doubt that I’m experiencing.

When I have a session with an ESL student, my focus is on the text at hand. Whether I’m addressing HOCs or LOCs, the writing has my attention. Reading Fox has gotten me to start thinking beyond that. How many students have I worked with that were facing these internal crises, and I completely missed it? As part of the system that seeks to shape their writing, I’m contributing to their stress. What is my responsibility, as a tutor, to ease this burden? What can I do? Even if I take an accommodationist approach, I can’t guarantee their professor’s reaction to stylistic differences in their writing. If being sensitive to cultural differences in writing styles ends up hurting their grade, I doubt they would be any happier than if I pushed them to “conform” to the American academic style. How can we get professors to work with us and with ESL students to find a path that facilitates communication while respecting cultural differences? This problem is so daunting and I feel so insignificant. What can I do to make a difference?