11/6 Reflection

This week at the Reading and Writing Center was definitely one of the most challenging. The two students I met with were both originally from different countries. The first girl I met with was a freshman student who was in the new composition course for freshman. She was from in Britain, but now lived in America. She had somewhat of an accent, which was difficult to understand when she read her paper aloud to me. When she started reading her essay, I knew I should have read it instead. I had a very difficult time hearing her pronounce words, for she spoke super fast and mumbled as well. I began to read to myself at that point because I was having a hard time comprehending what the essay was explaining. She ended up having a lot of issues with citations and also she lacked an introduction and conclusion. Originally, I had asked her for a rubric, which she lacked. So then I had her explain to me what she had to do for the assignment. She said “just any type of research paper.” I knew there was more to it, but she obviously didn’t want to say. At the end of our session with like five minutes left, she told me she had to do a annotated bibliography and I was mad. I had done the entire appointment assuming it was just a regular essay when it was not. And then I kept telling her her appointment was about over and she would not walk away. I am having trouble with getting students to leave appointments. Maybe you have some suggestions as to what I can say besides “your appointment is over”?

My next appointment was with a foreign exchange student who was from China. This was top three most difficult sessions for me. She spoke fluently, but she had such a thick accent I had to close my eyes and just focus on what she was saying. She said that she was journaling to work on her English skills, but she wanted her journal to be more descriptive and expressive. She explained to me that English lacks translations for Chinese words. She was such a sweet girl, but she had a difficult time understand why certain words did not make sense and was not open to using other words. That is what frustrated me the most. I need to work on communicating with foreign exchange students and maybe in class we can do a refresher because it has been a while since we did any ESL readings.