there’s no one who has told us yet what Boogie Street is for

[lotesse]

I get to work on Sor Juana this week yay! I saw her name in the files list, but was sure the assignment would have already gone out to someone. God she's the best. So excite.

Can any of y'all recommend resources for a Japanese ESL student dealing with college-level intro to composition coursework? My daddy goes soaring with a Japanese girl who's doing the aviation program at the local community college, and I guess she broke down on him last Sunday out at the airfield, overstressed and undersupported, so we're trying to help her out. I had her bring her materials to a meeting yesterday and sat with her for a bit; it looks to me like the main problem she's having is that she's having to deal so slowly and carefully with the language-comprehension stuff that she's not able to keep her thoughts clear, or cut through bullshit. There's also an awful lot of bullshit - I took the course she's in, long time passing, and it's comp-through-analysis-of-American-stereotypes, pretty much, and she neither knows nor really needs to know those stereotypes - but she does have to get through this class and the one after it in the comp sequence. I suggested audiobooks when possible, told her to stop writing in GoogleDocs and get herself a darn word processor with a spellchecker, but I was wondering if those of you who are trained for ESL education, or who have specific experiences with a Japanese/American situation, would know of anything more directly relevant to her needs.

Comments

[highlyeccentric]

I second the wordprocessor - if she can't afford Word, she should get LibreOffice.

I can't help with the american stereotypes problem, but if her college's writing lab website isn't helping her, she might benefit from the Write Site: http://writesite.elearn.usyd.edu.au/ In particular, if grammar is a problem, there are college-level examples up there, and the two problem grammar groups at USyd are 1. native speakers with no clue and 2. Asian language speakers.

My instinct, from teaching asian students over the years, is that she is likely to have good information retention and memorisation skills, but may be completely thrown by the form-your-own-opinion part of Anglophone academic writing. Even european students here seem to flounder more than australian educated students did with the craft-your-own-argument emphasis in Anglophone academia.

It may help to talk her through the gist/specific/detail breakdown for reading. That's the terminology used in ESL teaching: chances are, in reading assignments she's used to, she'll have been asked to answer gist questions first ('what sort of text is this', 'does the author agree or disagree with the interviewee', etc), then to mine for specific facts, then to answer detailed questions about the content or to formualte a response or recommendation.

That's very similar to the strategies a lot of us use for academic reading: get the gist of the article. note down the key points. then formulate more complex response, eg, what are its flaws or how can I use it. The same breakdown is what we try to teach our students here: first, read the assigned section from beginning to end. Then 'read for a thesis' then read again, colour-coding or whatever you do to assemble your evidence and respond.

She may think her classmates only read the text once - and indeed many of them will, and then bullshit. But it's worth reassuring her that reading something several times, with different strategies as you get to know the piece, is _good academic work_. Many native speakers just fall into it naturally as we get more advanced, but non-native speakers often can't start out with the read-and-bullshit setting.

[starlady]

While I suspect you're right that she's getting bogged down in the comprehension stage (and if she's trying to get 100% comprehension, that's too much; 66-75% is what I've consistently been taught to shoot for in second language acquisition prose reading), I'd second the comment that she's probably also being thrown by having to have her own opinion, and also arguing it if that is part of the assignments. I've read many a Japanese research piece of just about every length, and the vast majority of them are, to American eyes, just compilations of facts. Having to explicitly make a point and support it with evidence is probably also relatively new for her.

The other thing is, the workload is probably a lot more than she's used to. College was traditionally a four-year vacation in Japan; that's changing, but slowly and sporadically. Seven years ago when I was taking graduate seminars here in Japan, they did less work than I did as a student at a private high school in the States. And the kind of work she did in high school, particularly in reading, almost certainly centered on memorization.