Notice, first, the high number of relative clauses and the strategies to ensure cohesion, such as "these conflicts" to refer to the previous idea, or "such as" to indicate that an example follows. These indicate a sophisticated level of language awareness and writing proficiency. It may be tempting to imagine that the same strategies and uses of relative clauses to show relationships between ideas are used in all languages. If true, this would suggest that his highly developed first-language proficiency—he has a bachelor's degree from a university in Japan—simply "transferred over" from Japanese. These uses of language, however, are not universal. His knowledge of them in English had to be learned, and indeed, he has learned them quite well. Here is the beginning of his essay, entitled "Released from Restriction":

When I write essays and journals as English composition assignments, I sometimes wonder who wrote my papers because there are some conflictions¹ of ideas in them. I think these conflicts are not because of only lack of English knowledge such as grammar mistakes². Even though I write essays by myself, it seems that two different writers compose my papers without negotiations³. One writer seems to be often modest and conservative toward new things, but another does not. I had never experienced these kinds of contradictions before I learned a second language. After considering why my essays look like as two different writers wrote, I supposed that I changed the ways of thinking⁴…. [italics added]

The word marked #1 is the first word that seems to indicate this student's status as a nonnative English speaker. After all, how many of you use the word "conflictions"? According to the American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition, however, it is indeed a form of the word "conflict." This student cannot be expected to know that it is rarely used. His concern was merely to avoid repeating the word "conflict" too often—again, an important rhetorical consideration of which he was well aware.

The second sentence in his essay, marked #2, presents a more complicated problem. With the phrase, "such as grammar mistakes," he is illustrating the ways in the conflicts between ideas appear in his writing. This seems reasonable. "Such as" should be correct as an introduction to that illustration. However, he already mentions one possible cause of these conflicts: his lack of knowledge of English. Thus, once he attaches an example to that cause, as he does, that example should also serve to illustrate the cause of the conflicts. Grammar mistakes, however, are not the cause but rather the result of the two competing personalities he has developed. Therefore, "such as" no longer works. Interestingly, in the fourth version of this essay, before I had had a chance to talk with him about this problem, he added a phrase:

…not because of only lack of English knowledge such as grammar mistakes and perplexing word orders.

Italicized portion #3 is similarly complicated. He says, "Even though I write essays by myself, it seems that two different writers compose my papers without negotiations." In his fourth draft, intuiting that something about that phrase was not quite right, he spent over an hour on that sentence alone and ended up with "regardless of negotiations between the two writers." In his dictionary, "without" and "regardless of" are translated in similar ways, despite the fact that, in English, the former assumes that the two fictional voices do not speak to each other, whereas the latter assumes that they do. How many more years might he have had to study English on his own before he figured out that these two phrases were so diametrically opposed? Moreover, he was not aware of a basic difference between English and Japanese: English is much more verb-oriented, and Japanese is much more noun-oriented. My first thought, as a native English speaker, was to change not the word "without," but rather the word "negotiations." I suggested "without talking to each other" or "without consulting each other." Indeed, he told me, he had considered the word "consultations," since the thesaurus suggested it as an alternative. It did not occur to him to use a verb.

This same focus on nouns is what leads him to say, in italicized portion #4, "I changed the ways of thinking" rather than "I changed the way I think." Japanese has a single word for "way of thinking," and since one can change names or jobs (plural) in English, he relied on his understanding of that rule to make that term plural. He thus relied both on his first-language knowledge and his second-language knowledge but did not know that including a verb—within a relative clause, no less—would have been more natural in English.

I offer this extended example to illustrate how much knowledge multilingual students bring to every written text and spoken interaction in English. At the same time, most of them have not acquired the range of knowledge that native speakers have that allow us to make linguistic choices that result in very subtle, or very great, differences in meaning. Correcting every mistake is, as you have seen, beyond the capacity of those who cannot rely on guesses about what "sounds right," despite the depth of their linguistic knowledge.