I have worked with ESL students before, but have not truly been frustrated with the communication barrier until recently. I helped a client that needed work on the computer for the whole session, which was fine. Unfortunately though, I had to kick a client I had recently worked with off of the computer in order to use it for my current session. My client said she was not sure if her paper was good, and asked me to check for grammar. Once we got on the internet and had her assignment sheet up I began reading it. It was very specific about the structure of the paper, but vague regarding some of the content. I asked questions about what her prof had said about the assignment, and in trying to explain the instructions she experienced difficulty. When she did, she would smile and look up and make an “um” sound. When she did this I felt I needed to rephrase the question to get the info I need to help her. I decided that I would compare her paper and the instructions and see if she was missing anything. I found that while she addressed the questions of content she neglected the specifics of structure. Also, the answers she gave needed clarification. When I tried to tell her she needed to address the questions in a certain way specified by her prof, it just didn’t seem to get through. She just nodded. And I didn’t know where to go from there. What specifically did she not understand? Was it that there was a structure to it? Was it my direction? Did she expect me to just tell her verbatim what to write? Did she just want to get out of there? Did she not know what I was asking? Could she not formulate her answers? I had her show me where the sources of information she cited. Once we were there, I had her find additional information to address the prompt more fully. She put the info into her essay and I helped her structure her sentences. I noticed throughout her paper how she missed some of the little things a profesor would look for. An example being the difference between a major in Speech as opposed to a major in Communication Studies. Had she not been thorough in her analysis of the sources? Or had she assumed the two terms were synonymous and felt it irrelevant to state in her paper? I avoided these questions because I was afraid she would not know what I was asking her. Instead, I chose to work on her paper with her and simply tell her where she needed to add information and how it should be formatted according to her prompt. I felt like we had not accomplished anything, because we had only covered half of her one and a half page assignment.
