November 12-16

       This will be a somewhat shorter post than usual as I was too ill to come into work on Friday, a result of a nasty fainting spell I had the morning of, which left me horribly nauseated. However, Monday was full of appointments, and while most of them were just the same assignment four times, my first appointment that day was the most unique, and quite coincidental. We had just learned on Sunday how to go about a session with an English Language Learner (ELL), and so I was a bit panicked when my first appointment on Monday was just such a student who needed help with her English grammar and sentence structure. 
        As a natural English speaker myself, it took a moment of assessing both the paper and assignment for me to get a grasp on how to most effectively help the student with their work. Obviously I couldn't just tell them what was right and wrong, but in some cases the English was so mixed up, it was hard for me to understand what the student wanted to say. And so, as in all things, I started to develop skills and the right questions, leading questions, to ask. When presented with a sentence that just needed a slight tense adjustment to a word or two, I would point to it and ask, "Is there something we can do to this word to make things easier to understand," or "What other ending could we give this word to make it better?" Sometimes I would recommend that a word be placed in between two other words that the student had, and I provided frequent help and explanations with definite and indefinite articles because let's be frank - English is a little confusing when it comes to things like that.
         Two of the student's biggest questions that I answered at the end of our appointment was their confusion with certain verbs - like absorb and absorbs - and the imperfect -ing ending being used at times rather than the perfect -ed ending. Being a little rusty on my specific grammar rules, I answered them as best I could, saying that the imperfect case was called "imperfect" because the action is said to be still happening, whereas the perfect is a finished action. I pointed out several places where they had used the imperfect ending and wrote a few examples to help my explanation. As for the verb, the student had wanted to use "absorbs" with a plural noun, such as "leaves," but I had to try and explain why this is wrong. Unlike with other languages, English doesn't always agree in number, as the correct verb to pair with the plural "leaves" is "absorb," but the proper verb to pair with the singular "leaf" is "absorbs." The student left very appreciative of my efforts to help them, and seemed reassured of their decision to visit the writing center.

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