The recommendations made elsewhere on this website should help you in assisting any writer, whether she be a first-year student working on a Writing 5 paper, a senior working on an Honors Thesis, or an international, multilingual student. The multilingual student, however, could require some special attention. This page is intended both to sensitize you to the fundamental differences involved in working with writers for whom English is a second or third or fourth language, and to make some particular suggestions for helping these writers to understand their differences and so to improve their writing.
When assisting multilingual writers, you should remember, first and foremost, not to take anything for granted. When working with a writer who is educated in the States, you can (usually) assume that he knows what a thesis sentence is; that he understands the basic idea of the paragraph; that he will place a topic sentence at or near the beginning of each paragraph (or near the end), and that he understands (at least in a general way) the rules governing plagiarism.
However, with a multilingual writer -- especially for writers whose primary language is not English -- none of these principles can be assumed. The values we have as regards writing, argument, structure, and intellectual property are not universal. On the contrary: they differ from culture to culture, making the process of writing a paper for an American academic audience extremely confusing for the multilingual writer. Accordingly, when you assist these writers, you should keep some of the following differences in mind.
Why do we write? The purpose of rhetoric varies from culture to culture and is influenced very much by the culture's current politics and political history. Countries with very strong central governments are often plagued by severe censorship. Rhetoric which challenges authority can be dangerous and socially unacceptable; rhetoric which praises authority fills the newspapers, books, and airwaves. In these kinds of political situations, only one kind of rhetoric is socially sanctioned. All other purposes are suspect. Writers coming from cultures like these often have trouble creating argument because they believe it might threaten them or insult their readers.
You may need to talk with these writers about how discourse works in America. In the American academy, rhetoric is not necessarily a means of praising or vilifying our culture. Rather, it is a means of praising, and vilifying, and anything in between. In other words, in the American academy, students are encouraged to develop and defend their own points of view. Students must develop rhetorical strategies that help them to express what they think and value.
Nevertheless, while the American academy may encourage individualism, it also encourages writers to play by the rules. In other words, when one writes for the American academy, one is free to say what she wants to say, but one is also expected to follow certain discourse conventions: appropriate voice, structure, style, and so on. In short, tradition and convention are very real and present forces in American culture and rhetoric.
In writing for the American academy, then, multilingual writers must be willing take a stand. They must also determine who their audience is, the nature of the conversation they're entering, the conventions of that conversation, and how they are going to position themselves within that conversation.
In order to write effective American English prose, then, international writers will have to do more than simply master vocabulary and grammar. They will also need to learn the conventions of American English rhetoric. As a tutor, you will be helping writers to understand these conventions. We've listed a few conventions that our tutors often assume are absolute but that in fact differ widely from culture to culture.
From the Home Office in Baker comes the following top ten list of errors commonly made by multilingual writers. Some of these errors you will find in the writing of native speakers of English, but some (such as articles and preposition problems) are particular to writers for whom English is a second (or third, or fourth) language.
Articles are perhaps the most persistent problems for non-native speakers of English whose first language doesn't use articles. Occasionally, European speakers will exhibit some difficulty with articles as well: in many of these languages, every noun requires an article, and it is unclear to some speakers when articles should be omitted. On the other hand, a Native English speaker (even a young one) will never have trouble with articles: we know at some fundamental level when to use or to omit "the," "a," or "an."
To understand how articles are used, a writer must be able to distinguish whether the noun an article modifies is definite (specific) or indefinite (general). This depends on context. An indefinite noun represents something that is one out of many (its particular identity is unknown): a dog, some students, some air. A definite noun is something of which we know the particular identity: the dog, the students, the air. All definite nouns come with the definite article: THE. Indefinite nouns come with an indefinite article (A or AN) if they are singular and countable (a dog). Indefinite nouns that are plural (students) or uncountable (water) do not take an article.
Since usage is very context-specific, the difficulty lies in determining whether a noun is definite or indefinite and why this is so. Consider: "Mr. Kim, President of Dartmouth College, urged the students to find a passion that would inspire them to great deeds in the benefit of humanity." It's not easy to explain the article usage in a sentence like this! After all, President Kim could also "urge students" and still be grammatically correct! The choice he makes depends on his intent.
Making the problem even more difficult to explain is that some article use is idiomatic, or requires a lot of grammatical analysis in order to be understood. For example, why do we invite someone out to dinner, not out to the dinner, or a dinner? (Though we will always invite them out for a meal, not simply meal.)
You will do a lot of intellectual sweating attempting to help writers with articles, and you will be tempted to pass off most of what is hard to explain as idiomatic. Resist this temptation! Perhaps the usage is idiomatic, but an attempt to explain and to understand the finer points of grammar can be useful for your tutees - and for you as well.
This is a second area of error that is almost exclusive to multilingual writers. While some New Yorkers will wait on line (instead of in line, like the rest of us), for international writers the problem of prepositions is much more serious. Beginning writers will have trouble understanding why it is that sitting by the table is different from sitting at the table; more advanced writers will have trouble wrestling with the difference between being concerned with something, as opposed to being concerned by something.
Typically those prepositions used to express abstract thoughts will be particularly meddlesome: a multilingual writer may be able to visualize the difference between being on the water and in the water, but less able to see the difference between dwelling in and dwelling on a particular idea and emotion. Unfortunately, most preposition usage is simply that: a matter of usage. The best you can do is to explain differences to the writer, and to hope that she will take your explanation with her into her next paper or her next conversation with a native speaker.
Another category of error common to multilingual writers is incorrect use of infinitives. You will find that these writers will pattern their English sentences after sentences in their native languages, where often many rules (including the rules for infinitives) differ from the rules we use in English. Therefore, you will have writers composing sentences like, "I wouldn't mind to have a BMW." There are categories of verbs that call for the infinitive, and other categories that do not. If you are unsure about these categories, look them up with your students in any of the handbooks sitting on the RWIT shelves. In explaining the rule to the writer, you might learn something yourself!
Multilingual writers will sometimes confuse parts of speech, using an adjective where they want to use a noun, or a verb where they want to use a gerund, or an adverb where they want to use an adjective. This mistake is common when one is learning a foreign language (those of you learning German, French, Italian, etc. surely make the same kinds of mistakes). Be patient: usually pointing to the word in question is enough to make the writer hit himself in the head, utter some word that you don't understand, and provide the proper word for himself.
Subjects and verbs must agree, tenses must agree, and so on. While this category of error is not exclusive to multilingual writers, agreement errors are especially likely to plague their papers.
Multilingual writers will have problems with choosing the proper tenses; they will also be confused (as are our native speakers) by irregular verbs, such as lie and lay.
Most writers understand that they ought to avoid the passive voice. But multilingual writers often hide behind the passive voice as a way of not taking responsibility for ideas and sentences that they aren't sure about.
Multilingual writers (even more so than native speakers) often have trouble learning the boundaries of the English sentence and so are prone to fragments, run-ons, and convoluted prose. Going back to the basics will help these writers: explain to them the simple sentence, the means of coordination and subordination, and, perhaps most importantly, the limits of the English sentence. Often the idea that is expressed beautifully in Spanish, German, or Russian will break the back of the English sentence. Encourage the writers to be kind to their sentences. Help them to judge what an English sentence will bear.
Everyone has this problem, but multilingual writers are plagued by it. Often, a writer will punctuate a sentence according to the rules of her language: a Russian will always place a comma before the word "that," for example, simply because it's done that way where she comes from. If you notice persistent punctuation errors, talk with the writer about her native language. You may find the root of the problem there, and solving it will be that much easier.
For advanced multilingual writers, the most persistent problem is one of style. It is difficult to catch a language's music and subtle rhythms. Again, avoid the temptation of simply saying, "We don't say it like that!" Engage the writer in a discussion about language (when time allows). You may, in this discussion, teach her something about the beauty and delicacy of your own language (and, incidentally, you may learn something about the beauty and delicacy of hers).
Finally, we'd like to offer a few guidelines to follow when tutoring the ESL writer:
When faced with a paper written by a multilingual writer, the first thing a writing assistant should do is to determine whether or not the writer is indeed multilingual. Don't assume that convoluted sentences or sloppy grammar indicates that the writer's native language is not English. Instead, look for signs that these mistakes are indeed common multilingual mistakes. For example, if the paper is plagued by article errors, the writer is probably multilingual. Odd use of prepositions is another sign that the writer isn't writing in her native language.
Writing assistants often ask how they should deal with multilingual issues on a paper. Much of our training instructs our staff to be facilitative. We tell you not to correct error when you see it. And yet, with a multilingual writer, sometimes it seems silly not to make the correction. What is the right thing to do?
When in doubt, consider how your professors mark your papers in your foreign language courses. They probably mark errors without always naming them, indicating that something is wrong but leaving it to you to figure out what. This strategy works well with multilingual writers. You might also want to point out and to name recurring errors - articles, tenses, and so on - remarking on these errors in the margin notes and in the summary comment.
Finally, if a multilingual writer is having trouble mastering a clear and coherent style, choose a paragraph and suggest how it might be rewritten, modeling for the writer how to re-fashion one or two of his sentences, and encouraging him to do the same throughout the paper. Make yourself available for one-on-one conferences, or recommend a trip to RWIT.
