Andrew Week 3

This week I worked with an ESL student; Korean is his first language. What I found very interesting was how evident it was that he was thinking on a sophisticated level about the course material and the assignment he was working on, even as he struggled with mechanics and grammar. He was able to effectively circumlocute, both in his writing and his speech. I find the study of psycholinguistics--and particularly language acquisition-- absolutely fascinating, and this week provided an opportunity to reflect on the subject.

One thing that strikes me about comparing the writing skills and struggles of domestic and international students is the level of immersion and distance from language. In trying to tutor my international student, I found it very hard to articulate certain rules of grammar (specifically, the conventions of transitive and intransitive verb constructions, as well as idioms and prepositional phrases) because, I think, I was able to simply intuit them early on in life as a native speaker of English. However, when I've tutored native speakers in the past, some have deployed the proper grammatical forms but still struggle with articulating their thoughts clearly. 

As far as addressing these issues in tutoring, though, I'm not sure I can come up with any good rhetorical or linguistic practices/exercises that would be good to adapt for domestic and international students--I'm open to any ideas though!

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