Tips on Teaching ESL Students

Students who speak English as a second language might present unusual challenges to their instructors, but certainly none that can't be overcome with knowledge and thoughtfulness. This page will introduce a few important considerations and a few strategies for working effectively with ESL students, along with resources for further information.

Some things to understand:

Advanced language learning takes many, many, many years. Although international students (degree-seeking and short-term international exchange students) do achieve an acceptable score on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) before they are admitted, they are still learning A LOT of new language in their classes and their social environments every day. This language includes disciplinary vocabulary, slang, idioms, and every-day colloquial language—all delivered at a very rapid pace and often with a strange new southern accent that they have to work hard to understand. You can expect a lot of mistakes to be made, but gradually these students' English fluency does improve. It just takes time.

It also takes time to adjust to a higher level of demand on their language skills. Imagine taking driver's ed classes one day and driving solo through Greensboro the next. One day, you're driving a controlled route as you test out each new skill a little bit at a time. The next day, you're driving bumper to bumper on the freeway going 85 mph through a construction zone. Suddenly, every skill you've learned is in extreme demand!

Like new drivers, many ESL students have learned English in a controlled environment and have only used English in lower-demand situations. Suddenly they are expected to read two chapters a week for each of five classes, take lecture notes, participate in discussions, ask and answer meaningful questions, take exams, do outside research, and write lengthy term papers. As they juggle and balance everything demanding their intellectual focus, ESL students may very well make mistakes in their comprehension and production of English. Their fluency with the language does improve, but again, this happens over time.

Their adjustment to a new culture may also take some time. Not surprisingly, international educational cultures are as varied as international cuisines. At times, these differences will be obvious, but at others, the differences will be invisible or difficult to interpret correctly. The very quiet ESL students in your class might just be shy. Or they might be holding on for dear life as they get used to the greater demands on their language skills (see above), trying hard to process what they are hearing but unable to formulate a contribution to the discussion before the topic has changed. Or they might be so quiet because they believe university students are SUPPOSED to be silent. In many other countries, professors lecture, students listen carefully, and no class time is "wasted" on discussion. Students from some countries have been taught that it's disrespectful to ask questions—it wastes other students' time, it insults the professor's teaching skills, and it reveals the student's weak intellect. Seems strange, doesn't it? But many students have been trained in an educational culture that reveres the instructor (perhaps with unwarranted excess for our sensibilities) and values the students' diligent, rigorous, silent individual effort (perhaps with crippling isolation from our perspective).

Our educational culture is different: we encourage discussion and critical thinking; we value questions and engagement; we thrive on interactive educational environments and generally believe that these things promote the greatest learning. ESL students might adapt very quickly to this new style of learning, but others may need some reassurance, encouragement, and patience as they adjust.

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Some things to do:

Whether your students are working with their classmates, writing an essay exam, a term paper, or a research proposal, each student and each writing situation will be unique, but you can adopt a set of common strategies for interacting with the ESL writers and their writing in ways that will help them understand and meet the expectations in their new environment.

First, you can help by interacting with the ESL writer

Have conversations with your students about their characteristics, backgrounds, goals, and processes as students and as writers. Learn about them so you can help them identify the challenges more efficiently.
Understand that they may *never* have written an academic essay before because their educational culture had different ways for students to demonstrate mastery of the material. Also understand that they are working hard to adapt to what they learn here—so share your knowledge of our conventions in an informative and supportive way.
Set reasonable expectations. Grammatical perfection is not a reasonable expectation, but comprehensibility is. See the next section for advice on this distinction.
Provide clear explanations. Confirm students' understanding by asking them to explain the assignment in their own words rather than by asking, "Do you understand?"
Provide good examples and explain what makes them effective. Many students have never written an academic essay. Many have been taught to write them in a radically different style. Try to teach and provide examples of what constitutes good writing for each type of assignment.
Provide bad examples and explain what makes them ineffective and how they could be improved.
Schedule opportunities to listen to your students' writing ideas at various points in the writing process, and encourage them to identify exactly what they would like to receive feedback on. These conversations help you understand what the students are trying to achieve. With that understanding, you can help the students clarify, focus, develop, and organize their thoughts before and after they begin to write, leading to similarly clear, focused, developed, and organized ideas on paper!
Structure formal opportunities for students to discuss their writing with each other in class. With a bit of notice, students can prepare for these discussions and participate more fully, both giving and receiving the value of peer feedback.
Encourage students to form writing groups for a semester project or for longer term. Like most novice writers, they may not be aware of how normal it is to get feedback from their colleagues. Your encouragement could help them develop this beneficial practice.
Mentor a writing group. For one or two hours a week, you can guide several students at a time as they help each other develop as writers. See the suggestions and materials on our Writing Groups page.
Offer disciplinary writing courses that teach students about the types of documents they will write in their majors (and professions) and about effective approaches to those documents. Until that is possible, consider asking your students to generate a list of helpful writing information for new students.
Encourage students to review the materials available on the Writing Center's Student Resources page.

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You can also help by interacting with the text

Ignore the language mistakes that do not obscure the meaning severely, especially in the early stages. When you find a severely obstructive mistake, ask students to "tell me more about what you're trying to say here" so you can help them find the language to express their ideas.
Remember that the information may not be organized in exactly the way you're used to, but there may be a very clear pattern. Be open. When you see your child standing on her head, you still recognize her. Same with paragraphs—the topic sentence may be at the end, so be a flexible reader as you are taking in the information.
Consider the purpose of the text and your knowledge of what makes this kind of text effective. Provide positive reinforcement of the effective elements. Try to determine the nature of the weaknesses. In other words, why isn't the text achieving the students' stated purpose? Is the topic too broad? Is the major claim stated weakly? Does it need more support? More appropriate support? An example in a critical place? Does it need to be arranged in a particular way?
Phrase your responses in ways that are text-specific and instructive. "Text-specific" comments are those that can only be written on that specific text. They are motivating because they reflect the reader's genuine engagement with the writer's text. So a comment like "Good. Develop." or "Awkward" could be stamped on any student's paper—and not teach the students anything about what to do next. But a comment like "Good. Add example" or "More info about disease progression would help me understand treatment phases" might take a bit longer to write, but it does give students very individual feedback and clear instruction for their specific text.
When students want grammatical feedback:

Again, concentrate on errors that severely obstruct the meaning. See above.

Ask students to identify specific structures they'd like grammatical feedback on.

Choose one or two types of errors to concentrate on, like verb tense. You'll overwhelm yourselves and your students if you mark *every* error at the same time. Choose the most frequent or what seems most important at the moment.

Mark those errors without correcting them. Give students time to self-correct (alone or with others) and invite them to talk with you about the mistakes that can't correct independently.

Marvel at the proficiency your students are demonstrating with incredibly difficult language.

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How does the Writing Center help?

The Writing Center works with ESL students as developing writers and language learners. In our 50-minute face-to-face tutorials, we collaborate with students to address their concerns at any stage of the writing process: from understanding the assignment, through brainstorming, researching, drafting, revising, editing and proofreading. As with all writers, we help students develop effective strategies for understanding what is expected of them in this new educational culture and for working through each of these stages in the writing process so that their skills carry over to subsequent writing projects.

We *do not* proofread and edit students' papers, but we do provide grammatical feedback. Tutors help students identify and correct the errors that seriously interfere with a reader's understanding, then concentrate on perhaps one or two recurring *types* of error, such as consistently incorrect verb tense. We work on helping the student understand that particular grammatical structure, and on teaching the student how to analyze the rest of the text for the correct usage of that one grammatical structure. This approach does have a positive long-term effect on students' English fluency, but it requires that students and their instructors understand and overlook the variety of inconsequential errors that remain in any one text.

We do maintain an extensive collection of resource materials for all the writers we serve. These can be found on our handouts page, with a more streamlined collection on our ESL Resources page as a good starting point for newly acculturating students.

The Writing Center also has an ESL Specialist on staff who is available for consultation about working with ESL students. Please feel welcome to call, write, or stop by any time. See our Faculty Resources page for more information about the Writing Center's services and policies.

Where can I learn more?

UNC Center for Teaching and Learning's Teaching for Inclusion: International Students, where UNC's international students discuss their experience here and describe what helps them succeed.
Purdue University's US Higher Education: A Cultural Introduction to learn some of the surprising things your students have to learn about.
TESOL Second Language Writing Interest Section's Second Language Writing Bibliographies, an accessible list of references for novices to the field.
Second Language Writing Research Network Forum, an extensive collection of references to research, organizations, and scholars.

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