The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento

Labels and Misleading Assumptions: “ESL Students”
87
Sarah Faye
Spring 2011
Labels are easy. We throw them around without thinking, thus putting people into strict
categories for easy filing. However, being a tutor means being flexible when encountering unexpected
tutoring situations, and respecting the students as individuals. Therefore, we must be careful when we use
easy, one-size-fits-all, labels such as: “ESL students.”
Sharon A. Myers’ article on tutoring ESL students points out some techniques on how to help
students who are struggling with the English language, and these techniques can undoubtedly be very
useful for tutoring multilingual students. Myers says that ESL students need to focus on “the ‘linguistic
component’ (vocabulary and syntax) much or more than [on] the ‘writing’ (rhetorical) component,” and
that we should pay attention to LOCs when tutoring ESL students (Myers 220). As an example, she states
that “subject-verb agreement is a difficult feature of English” (Myers 230). I agree: the English
language’s grammar rules are mind bogglingly difficult – but this is so for ESL and native speakers alike.
So why only help ESL students with LOCs? Just because we have labeled them as “ESL students?”
Behind the label “ESL,” there are two lurking assumptions: 1) all ESL students don’t know
English very well; 2) all native speakers know English very well. These assumptions do not reflect the
reality, since I am a so-called ESL student and I tutor a native speaker who does not know the rule of
subject-verb agreement. Should we call my native speaker an “ESL student?” After all, why should we
separate ESL students from native speakers who have the same difficulties with the English language?
The focus here should not be the place of birth, but the level of proficiency with written English. When I
tutor my native-speaker student, I apply Myers’ method of focusing on LOCs, showing him “the many
complex ways a language determines, subordinates, coordinates, lexicalizes and so on” (Myers 224). I do
this because I recognize that this native-speaker student has similar language issues as what Myers calls
ESL students.
The term “ESL” is misleading. Although we break this term down in class into different
categories (international students, immigrant students, Generation 1.5, and eye vs. ear learners), Myers’
article throws around the label indiscriminately, as if ESL students all came from the same background
and had the same level of proficiency with the language. Rather than just labeling students as “ESL,”
tutors should always take into consideration more important things than the place of birth, such as the
level of confidence with the language, the understanding of the American rhetorical and academic
conventions, and the individual preferred learning style.
I want to come back to one of the assumptions behind separating ESL from native speakers,
which is: assuming that native speakers should know written language better than ESL students. This
assumption can affect the way we see native speakers who have the kind of problems that Myers links to
ESL students. We might wonder why, since they were born here and speak English at home, they do not
understand a specific grammar rule. We might get frustrated that they are not able to pick up their
mistakes when they read their paper a second time. But native speakers, like ESL students, come from
very different backgrounds; some of these backgrounds did not offer them real opportunities to have
someone teaching them the rules of grammar and spelling, or mentoring them in the differences between
spoken and written conventions. However, tutors often believe they should not point out LOCs to native
speakers, since they think these students should be able to see their mistakes when they reread their drafts.
If the students fail to meet these unrealistic expectations, tutors might see them as lazy or distracted. Even
worse, I have witnessed native speakers being completely demoralized by the comments that their
professors left on their writing. The tone in some of these comments stops just short of calling them
stupid because they keep making the same grammar or spelling mistakes. These comments reveal the
professors’ impatience towards students they feel should know “better than that,” and these professors’
assumptions about their students create an environment of frustration that goes against effective learning.