I recently had a client that was an ESL student that brought in a paper she wanetd to work on. She asked immediately for help with grammar. She did not mention anything else, just grammar. I asked her for a description of the assignment, and since she did not have a hard copy we went to the computer. When she pulled up the syllabus that described the assignment, I found it very vague. I had her describe what her professor had said about the assignment, and it was basically what was on the syllabus. She had to use research from previous assignment to do a self-analysis (it was a psych paper). Having a general idea of what she had to do, we began to go through her paper. She pointed out a couple spots she felt oculd be corrected for grammar, and I made some suggestions. I told her that in addition to doing this, however, I wanted to make sure she addressed the prompt. She said this was fine, and we continued. After going through the first two pages in which she described the intention of the analysis she was doing, I asked her if she talked about herself in the paper. She informed she had, yes, but not significantly. I looked back at the prompt, and it said she needed to do a self analysis. I asked her what previous work she had done in the class and if this assignment is part of a larger project. It apparently was, so I began to see an issue in the focus of her paper. She said previous assignments involved picking a topic and researching studies done on that topic. If that topic was all about the research, was two out of five pages in this paper necessary to describe what she was doing? I asked her opinion on it, and she said “I don’t know.” This frustrated me, since it is her paper and she should decide what to do with it. I want to avoid directing the paper, but I wanted to have her explain why it should be one way and not another. At this point I began asking her more questions about her paper, trying to figure out what exactly she was doing. Frequently when I asked “What do you think about this?” I recieved in response “I don’t know.” I remained pleasant throughout the session, but found myself wanting to tell her to just take control and tell me what she was doing with the paper. I worry though that I made her second guess herself that will result in her editing the paper and taking out relevant things or adding irrelevant things. This was the first time I had a session with an ESL student where I became frustrated, all because “I don’t know.”
