The courage and strength of English learners is something to which I never gave a thought until I took ESL tutoring classes. My only recollections of being unable to communicate were in some Spanish classes, when I was in Jr high and high school. I was fortunate enough to have a Spanish teacher despised by most students, but an excellent language instructor. He never spoke a word of English in class. i have a musician's ear and am an aural learner. I was also raised with a maternal grandmother in our home who spoke pigeon English mixed with Polish and a pair of paternal grandparents who didn't spare us Sicilian lingo, so I had heard and liked the sound of other languages. I never faced having to cope with speaking a new and foreign language at a hospital or bank. I have such respect and admiration for people who forsake comfort for opportunity by coming to the United States and trying to integrate into society, business, places of worship, schools and every other walk of life.
My students have been here for a while, but they still have some significant linguistic needs. Some are practical, and day-to-day kinds of things and others are extremely specialized.
The best advice I can give tutors is to be warm and informal, but being certain to be appropriate. These students need to feel comfortable trying to express with what they think they need help and they need to be able to freely convey the order of importance and priority for those things. It will not always be easy for them to tell us what they need, but we must not impede them by our comportment, tone, impatience or haste.
Although I have not been working with my students for long, their success is of paramount importance to me. It's my job and joy to balance what they need and how best to lead them through their growth and understanding of how we use English in the United States.
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