The ever-increasing multilingual student population at Boise State, as at most colleges across the nation, is creating a wonderfully diverse atmosphere on campus. Alongside the virtues of a diverse campus, however, come some unique learning issues for these students and pedagogical issues for faculty. The national organization of college writing instructors, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, has addressed these issues in a position statement urging college personnel to "recognize the regular presence of second-language learners..., to understand their characteristics, and develop instructional and administrative practices that are sensitive to their linguistic and cultural needs."

• Need information about Boise State University ESL (English as a Second Language) Programs?
• Want suggestions about reasonable accommodations you can make for second-language learners in your classes?
• Looking for information about ESL tutoring?
• Building Bridges: A guide for working one-on-one with nonnative speakers, design especially for tutors.
• Communication Breakdown: A few helpful hints for solving communication problems.
• Crossing Cultural Boundaries: Students' suggestions for improving classroom learning.

• The Intensive English Program provides an intensive 20 hours a week of English instruction for students who plan to enroll in classes at Boise State.
• Adult Basic Education provides classes that Boise State students are eligible to take but that are usually at beginning and intermediate levels.
• ESL academic writing courses (ENGL121, 122, 123) are offered at the pre-English 101 level.
  
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Below are a few suggestions for helping nonnative English speakers succeed in your classes. For a more detailed report, please read Working with Nonnative English Speakers and/or call Gail Shuck, Assistant Professor of English, 426-1189 (gshuck@boisestate.edu).

Most importantly, make sure that those students know that you respect their desire and willingness to work harder than most native English speakers for their education. Most of their college work -including taking tests, writing papers, reading, even listening to lectures- simply takes them longer.

• If at all possible, give nonnative speakers extra time on tests. Even after 20 years of exposure to a second language, cognitively demanding activities such as tests on academically challenging material, make one resort to translating or taking far longer to work through difficult syntax and new vocabulary.
• Consider making revision an integral part of your courses; most ESL students take very seriously opportunities to revise their writing.
• Pause often while speaking, in order to give ESL students time to process the language they just heard.
• Use visual aids.

Remember that anything you can do to help nonnative speakers will necessarily help native speakers as well.

Do not expect grammatically perfect papers from ESL students. Because nonnative speakers have had merely a fraction of the exposure to spoken and written English in naturally-occurring contexts that native speakers have had, the vast majority of them do not control the vocabulary and syntax and discourse conventions that native speakers do. Errors persist for second-language speakers' whole lives because they do not have the intuitive grammatical knowledge, in many cases, to correct them. For this reason, they will get native-speaking roommates or friends to "correct" their work. The expectation that student papers have perfect grammar has a number of short- and long-term consequences:

• It almost automatically sets up nonnative speakers for failure.
• Overly zealous editors will end up revising the content of the ESL students' work. It then becomes impossible to evaluate how well your student is actually doing.
• Students don't learn any more English from those corrections because the editor is usually incapable of pointing out patterns of error.
• The editor may misinterpret the writer's intentions and "mis-correct."
• If we focus our (and their) attention solely on errors, we neglect important opportunities to offer new phrases and sentences structures.

This sentence was the critical to the student's main point. A good suggestion might be to say, "Do you mean you were frustrated? You felt helpless? You felt a sense of loss?" Then the student must now decide what he or she meant but now has access to more ways of expressing similar feelings. Of course, you can't do this every time. However, if you choose just a few points on which to comment in this way -points that are crucial to the paper- you will have given your student quite a gift.

Set ESL students up with "buddies" --native English-speaking students who take good notes or seem otherwise particularly responsible.

Set up study groups, informal review sessions, and collaborative assignments for all of your students. ESL students may be more likely to take advantage of those opportunities, but all students who participate will benefit.

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