The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento

An initial, and lasting, significant difficulty for Asian students learning English is the alphabetic script.
Learning and writing the letters is not difficult – especially compared to memorizing and writing
thousands of characters, but students find the amount of space a word to use – it’s length in letters – a
challenge. Ideograms present a word in a relatively compact space, so reading in English can be both
physically (because the eyes are not trained to read in strings) and cognitively (because of the time and
sound memory needed) demanding. (Chang 310) Even in more advances years of study, Asian students
may struggle with comprehension of texts that are longer or convoluted (prompts).
Grammar and Mechanics
• Verbs: Chinese, and related languages, do not conjugate or inflect verbs. Writers will likely have
trouble with subject verb agreement, irregular verbs, and simply choosing the correct tense. In
Chinese, tense is marked with adverbials, so these might be overused in English. Phrasal verbs
also do not exist in Chinese, so writers will likely avoid them.
• Pronouns: The Chinese pronoun system does not distinguish gender or case. Writers may simply
always use the same gendered pronoun, as in ‘John is here, she’s inside’ – always choosing ‘she’
regardless of the subject, or writers may choose pronouns randomly. Similarly, the distinction
between I/me or my/mine isn’t made, so students may confuse these in English.
• Prepositions: Like many languages with a more regular preposition system, the idiomatic English
prepositions will be challenging.
• Plurals: Learners often have trouble remembering to add the plural ‘s’ to nouns because nouns are
not marked in their 1 st languages. The array of English non-count nouns is confusing also. Some
students will tend to ‘over-correct’ and pluralize nouns in incongruous situations.
• Articles: Chinese does not use articles, so the English system is difficult.
• Conjunctions: Writers will commonly over-use conjunction words, placing them at the beginning
and middle of a sentence, as in ‘Because I didn’t know him, so I didn’t call him.’
Learning and Writing Styles
The methods of education will greatly affect a writers’ work. Asian students tend to have great respect
for teachers and consider them persons of authority, so students may find it difficult to express opinions
or share their own ideas. Memorization is a popular learning tool, and Chinese students are especially
adept memorizes – probably due to the ideogram writing system that must be memorized (Zhong 7).
Unfortunately, memorization skills may not serve students well for writing activities where analysis and
explanation are needed. It is also important to note that Asian students are extremely industrious and hard
working (Chang 322). A tutor should never assume that a written draft is a 1 st , 2 nd , or even a 3 rd . These
students pour over their work and are reluctant to show anyone work that is not their greatest effort. I
spent about two years, over a dozen papers, tutoring and working with a Laotian student and never saw a
draft fresher than 5 th . It is important for tutors to be aware of their responses to these papers that have
already been through rigorous readings and rewritings to prevent from making detrimental comments.
South Asian languages (Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, Bengali, and others)
These languages, and others, come from the same language family, so many challenges faced my English
learners will be similar for students even with different first languages.
Another group of South Asian languages – including Tamil and Telegu - comes from a different family.
The grammatical and sentence level mistakes made by these learners will be different, but the higher-
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