Consultant Shadowing (Day 4)

I got the opportunity, to once again, observe a consultation regarding an international student. This particular time the writer was an exchange student from Turkey, and had only been in the U.S. since the start of the semester. Having already received comments from her teacher on the assignment, the writing consultant was able to focus more on the broader ideas of style and sentence structure, rather than the idioms of individual grammar issues. It was interesting to see how the writer attempted to use turns of phrase that were uncommonly used in English, yet were not technically wrong. It was difficult for the consultant to explain these "unwritten rules" to the writer because many of them have no reasoning. This being said, she did a great job of showing the correct ways in which to express the writer's ideas in a more clear and concise manner. It was especially beneficial to observe another ESL consultation, because I feel like that is where I lack the most experience as of now. As a bit of a side not, I have been impressed with the level of writing that many of these students are able to produce in English. It is a remarkable skill to be fluent in multiple languages, and frankly a skill I am quite jealous of haha.