Last week, we got to view a very short and brief documentary about ESl students in America. It was fascinating to hear these individuals talk about the shock of being in a different culture, that was different than their own. This week in our blog, we had to answer two different questions dealing with culture and writing.
I think the environment that surrounds a person does indeed affect the way they write and their viewpoint that is represented in their writing. Their knowledge is obtained through what they have learned in the coutnry they live in. I can write creatively, about a number of topics that deal with anything that I am familiar with. Unfortunatly, during this semester, whenever I have read an ESL student's paper on certain topics, I often struggle to understand the point of their paper.
For example, a student from Kuwait, came in and presented to me a paper that dealt with his experience's with concerts in Kuwait. Before I go any further, I would like to make it very clear, than I have attended many concerts in America, and only in America. So when this student told me the paper was going to be about concerts, I was immediatly excited. Who in their entire life has never been to a concert?
I love going to concerts, and writing about a concert is usually pretty easy to understand, but his paper wasn't. I know nothing of how concerts are conducted over in Kuwait. Normally, to consider the type of audience that is going to be at a concert in America, you look at the music that is going to be played at the concert. For example: A rock concert is probablly going to draw mainly teenagers and younger adults, but I can't imagine many seniors being there. The type of concerts that he was writing about, didn't really make any sense to me at all. It seems that there were different crowds for the different bands that played, which was odd to me. There were also two different stages with bands playing on them at the same time. This was very easy for him to write about, because this was all that he knew. Helping him with his punctuation and grammar was easy, but understanding the topic of his paper and what point he was trying to make was really hard for me to understand. I wish I had asked him questions about what he knew and what was familiar with him from his other country, before we began our session.
I write what I know, and only know. I don't speak a second language, but I wish that I did, so that way I could be more useful with the ESL students. I hope that the next time that I meet with an ESL student, I can hopefully develop a conversation with them that deals with what they have learned about the differences between America and the other country they used to inhabit, and how I can learn from them also.
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You are spot-on in realizing the need to understand where the client is coming from before you can effectively help her or him with an essay. Making time for conversation is very important. However, it's also appropriate even in the middle of a session to stop and say, "You know, I'm having some difficulty understanding your essay, because when you say 'concert' I obviously think of concerts in America, and you seem to be writing about a very different kind of concert." What this does is signal to the student that an American reader doesn't have the context s/he has; by not sharing that context, the writer is unintentionally confusing the reader. You can have a conversation with the client about differences between concerts in America and concerts in Kuwait, while taking notes, and then suggest that the client spend more time in the essay explaining what a concert is like in Kuwait and even comparing it to an American concert, so an American reader could follow the point of the essay. But again, the pre-textual stage is still very important, and many cultural differences can be noted there so a session doesn't go off the rails! (And yes, that's another idiomatic phrase!)
ReplyDeleteHm. I am now wondering what they mean as well. I know in the Netherlands we had this huge concert thing that was called PinkPop, and there were three stages with three different bands playing on them at all time, and you could kind of walk between the stages. Maybe that's what he was talking about.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, I think building understanding is really important to helping any student, especially ESL students. This is a pretty difficult learning process, but it's a good one.