ELL didn't intimidate me like I thought it would

This is my first semester at Boise State's Writing Center. I was terrified of helping ELL students at first. I thought there would be major communications problems during the consultations, which there were not. I also worried excessively about how hard their papers were going to be. They were not hard to read to any degree which I'd imagined.

Now that I've had the wonderful opportunity to work with these very interesting and extremely intelligent people, I have been considering the focus of my master's degree with great thought. I am an English secondary education major, so I naturally thought that I would continue my education after my bachelor's degree with an education department or pure-English language master's degree.

I have a few different master's in mind, but one that is intriguing to me is the ELL master's. I have been thinking more and more about this one because I can see, especially in Boise, the need of this important area of study.

ELL students at the college level are well-spoken and intelligent. I was expecting to have a bunch of people that did not understand me. I love talking to them because ELL students always have interesting stories to tell me about where they are from and who they are. These people are so interesting because they've grown up in different places in the world. I have had consultees coming from various parts of India, Thailand, many of the countries my Air Force significant other calls the "-sthans," Mexico, and Spain. How culturally diverse is that? For me, it makes a very fast thirty minutes.
I am also taking the entry-level Linguistics class right now. If I had not been taking this course at this time, I would not have realized how truly strange the English language is. I have had a few different people tell me that the confuse words that sound alike in English all the time. I would never have noticed or even given it a second thought if they had not pointed it out to me. “Thought,” “taught,” “think,” “thought,” “through” and “though” are the group of words that were confusing to one student. I thought about how we would transcribe those words with the IPA alphabet, and I realized how similar the words are! Once that clicked in my head, I’ve made sure to point out this fact to ELL consultees because I have noticed that when they get words like this confused, they’re a little ashamed of it when they have no reason to be. I hope I’m making a difference in the writing center, because every single consultee is making a large impact on me.