On the subject of students for whom English is a second language, most professors will say all the right things: They hope that those students are ethically and appropriately recruited and that institutions help them to adjust to campus life. What professors won’t say is how much some of them resent teaching English-language learners.
Faculty members know how it would sound to say, “I wish they weren’t in my classes,” and so instead say things like, “These students take up a lot of my time.” They say it with a sigh. Some faculty members rightly voice concerns about too-low fluency thresholds that do a disservice to international students (another argument all together). And of course, some instructors, rather than resenting having to teach non-native English speakers, relish the diverse perspectives those students bring to the classroom.
But the fact is, many faculty members find it challenging to work with international students, and think teaching students who are learning English as a second language (or third, fourth, or fifth, in many cases) means teaching in a new way. And it does. What they don’t often see are the ways in which shifting one’s teaching style might be the most useful change they can make.
Although I now teach academic and professional writing, for the first six years of my teaching career, I taught and tutored adult English-language learners. I see it as the most valuable teaching experience I could have secured. Not only does it come in handy (because I always have a handful of international students in my courses now), but teaching non-native speakers has also made me a better teacher of everyone.
Here’s what I learned then that I still keep at the forefront of my teaching now.
It doesn’t matter if you look like an idiot sometimes. People say understanding humor is difficult in a non-native tongue, but I’ve found just the opposite. Telling a joke is difficult. But if you pretend to flop around, arms pressed to your sides like fins, to illustrate the phrase “fish out of water,” you will get a laugh from people of all nationalities. And they’ll also remember the idiom.
I was new to the classroom when I first began teaching second-language learners, but I found pretty quickly that being myself (which isn’t exactly a super-cool persona) aided my students’ learning. And that has carried over into the rest of my teaching. If I can get my students to remember something by making a dumb pun, I’ll make it. If I don’t know the answer to a question they ask, I tell them I don’t know but will find the answer. And I trace that instinct to be open and natural in the classroom to the years I spent learning how to connect with non-native speakers.
Thinking about language in new ways is valuable. Non-native-speaking students think about English differently, which forces us as teachers to think differently, too. Try articulating the nuance between “imagine” and “visualize.” Or how about between “troubled” and “concerned”?
Most teachers of international students find it’s not easy on the first go, but as we answer more and more of their language questions, we begin to think about our daily use of words and phrases more consciously, and that affects both our own writing and the ways in which we talk about language with students.
Further, I’ve found that non-native speakers are also often more eloquent in English than the rest of us because they have no tired clichés to rely upon. I’m recalling a moment when a student who was on a diet — instead of saying she was “dropping a few pounds” — told me, “I am trying to reduce myself.” (That became one of my favorite phrases.)
Considering such language issues reminds us that other ways of speaking or writing are not necessarily wrong, no matter how much our ears might twitch when we hear them. That allows us to hear all of our students with a more open mind.
Only good comes from being a better grammarian. In my first semester of teaching, a timid, delightful Thai student asked, “Teacher, isn’t that sentence written in past perfect?” — to which I replied, “Is it? Hmm. That seems possible, yes. Umm, or is it? … No. Maybe?”
In my writing courses that kind of fumbling happens to me less frequently now, but it still occasionally happens. Most international students are more discerning than Americans of the subtleties of English grammar rules because they’re using those rules to govern their speaking and writing, rather than relying on the usually adequate “this just sounds right” strategy that native speakers have in their tool kits. Teaching English as a second language requires you to elevate your grammar knowledge, too.
Cultural sensitivity is required at all levels. When I started teaching international students, I knew enough to consider the diverse backgrounds, religions, and viewpoints in my classroom. I tried hard not to stereotype or to make assumptions about them. I varied my examples. And yet, I still botched it occasionally.
There is a difference between knowing that cultural sensitivity is important and actually trying to respond to diverse viewpoints and values as a teacher, failing, and then eventually rethinking and trying again in practice. Pushing doughnuts and juice on Muslim students without realizing they’re fasting for Ramadan? I did that. The exercise on paraphrasing for which I showed that vaguely racy Beyoncé video? Ineffective and, judging from some of the looks on my students’ faces, offensive. (Yes, in hindsight these mistakes feel obvious.)
Learning that lesson the hard way in a classroom filled with people of obviously varying backgrounds helped me to realize that sensitivity — in ways much more complex than Beyoncé — is key, even if most people in the room look similar. I thought I was inclusive and open before; now, I am much more so.
Don’t BS your students. International students, especially those I was tutoring long-term, tended to bring me home-cooked treats. Sometimes they were tasty, and sometimes not. Ultimately I realized that pretending to enjoy a treat that I found mostly repulsive was a very poor, albeit polite, strategy. The students could always tell I was pretending, and a feigned reaction breeds distrust. So I started being honest about my food likes and dislikes. I wasn’t mean (“these biscuits are disgusting”), just truthful (“these are not my favorite treats”).
That lesson also applies in my courses today, even though the few American students who have brought me sweets have played it safe and relied on chocolate. When I first began teaching, I found myself cushioning my criticism of students’ work. I worried that full honesty (“this paragraph doesn’t make any sense at all”) would discourage them, and so I tried to water down every criticism (“this paragraph was slightly confusing”), but that only confused students as to whether they needed to fix the problem. So now I am more direct: “Have you considered X, Y, and Z? Those could be key as you rethink this unclear paragraph.”
Motivated, confident students are successful students. My non-native speakers had perhaps the biggest motivation possible: They wanted to succeed at an American university. And that drove them to learn. My role was to help them feel comfortable in the classroom.
In the courses I teach now, intrinsic motivation isn’t always so obvious, and so I spend time with my students throughout the semester talking about their own motivations for learning the things we’re working on. Likewise, their comfort in my classroom is more important to the learning process than perhaps any other factor, and I’ve found that this comfort often comes from my (incessant) cheerleading. Enthusiastic support, it turns out, makes a huge difference in both motivation and engagement for all students. Now, even in classes filled with native English speakers, I am thrilled when an evaluation reads, “The professor seemed so confident that I could be successful that I worked harder to meet those expectations.”
I am undoubtedly a better teacher because of my experience of working with non-native English speakers. I encourage other faculty members who find themselves frustrated by — or even proud of — the extra time or effort they give to international students to consider what it would mean to think that hard about their interactions with all of their students.
