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.

Benefits of working in a writing center--what are you learning?

I signed up to work in the writing center because I personally felt like I needed a lot of practice giving feedback on other people's writing, especially when I felt like it was already "good." In a few classes last semester, I felt almost inadequate to give people suggestions on their papers, and I felt like just saying "it's real good." I knew better than that though, and I really felt like I was not a "good enough" writer to give other writers at a college level suggestions on their work.

I have taken some Boise State Writing Project courses over this past summer, and this really helped my anxiety with feedback with peers. I was working with people who already had bachelor's degrees and that were using them in the real world, teaching. At first I was a little anxious to share with "real teachers," because they had more writing experience than what I had. This anxiety didn't last long because they treated me just like they treated the others, the "real teachers." which gave me more respect for them and also formed some friendships.

After taking those classes, I felt more prepared to work in the center. There was still one thing that haunted me: ELL students. (dun-dunn-daa...) My second consultation was with an ELL student who spoke Indonesian (perhaps?) as their first language. I was intimidated. We have a lot of ELL students come into BSU's center, and I've learned a few things about them that I really never had considered before. I know that ELL students are usually quite fluent writers, at least in their first language, and they usually need a little help with their verb tenses and grammatical structures.

I've also learned that by asking them to tell me a little information about themselves, it really helps understand where they have come from culturally. Interestingly enough, I've actually been able to ask them questions about their culture that I've been dying to know! I like working with ELL students because they have a lot of interesting perspectives and cultural differences to learn from.

In fact, I'm considering getting an ELL Master's degree when that time comes. (But this is one idea among about ten....)