Tutoring ESL Writers: We Don't Edit; Here's What We Do

by Devon Ward-Thommes,, MFA TA / Tutor

As a new teaching assistant and writing tutor trainee at the writing center, I had the opportunity to observe one of Eiman Hajabbasi’s sessions with a non-native speaker from China. Eiman is one of two ESL specialists supported by the English Language Institute (ELI) to tutor in the writing center, reflecting their concern for the high proportion of non-native students seeking tutoring. In addition to tutoring, the ESL specialists help to train new tutors and develop resources for instruction.    Efficient and informative, Eiman’s session seemed like a template for how to tutor non-native speakers—and native English speakers as well.  In fact, the methods Eiman employed could be useful for teaching with writing across the disciplines, as I will show in this article.

The student came in with an assignment from an English 101 class, prompting him to write an informative paper to an audience that knows nothing about his subject. He was supposed to use explanation and detail to define his terms and illustrate his experience growing up in a church-going family. After listening to him read the paper out loud, Eiman praised the student for the authenticity of his ideas, and then set a session agenda that included his concerns about grammar, and also  larger structural issues she identified in the paper.

After a discussion of these larger structural concerns, Eiman moved to his grammar concerns. She had made small check marks in the margins of the essay as the student read aloud, indicating sentences with grammatical mistakes. Next she noted which errors were repeated in the paper, beginning with comma splices. She pointed out a comma splice error and asked the student to explain the error. When he could not, she broke the sentence down, explaining that there were two independent clauses separated by a comma. 

The student understood the difference between independent and dependent clauses, which is typical of many non-native speakers who have had to study grammar in learning English, and suggested that he could separate the sentences with a period. 

Eiman praised his solution but also explained that students commonly make the mistake of comma splicing in order to avoid short, choppy sentences. She showed him how to use a semicolon or a coordinating conjunction to fuse two independent clauses in the same sentence.

After she’d drawn a chart demonstrating this concept, they found several examples of comma splices in following paragraphs, and they worked through them together, with the student coming up with the solutions. Using this same teaching strategy, Eiman turned to two other patterns of errors: incorrect or missing articles and inconsistent verb tense.

At the end of the session, Eiman gave the student all the charts she had drawn to demonstrate the grammar concepts they’d discussed.  She also gave him writing center handouts on count and non-count nouns as well as independent vs. dependent clauses.

The student seemed receptive and engaged in the session, leaving with some valuable tools to improve this paper and others he will be writing.