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Unlike foreign students, recent immigrant students may not have received formal English language training in their home country. A recent immigrant may have spent one to six years in the U.S. prior to starting college. They are in the incipient stage of learning English, and often they are more fluent in conversation than in writing. Their writing contains a large array of syntactical, vocabulary, spelling, and word choice errors. Because recent immigrants often resort to literal translations to express themselves, the end result can be incomprehensible. These students usually benefit from ESL instruction.
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In the samples below, the reader must struggle to understand the intended meaning. The writing exhibits lack of sentence variety and an overwhelming amount of grammatical errors. Many errors are repeated, indicating lack of awareness rather than carelessness. The word choice and sentence structure errors provide strong evidence of limited English proficiency.
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| For example, teach them how to become electricity, and can help because some of them was committed crimes looking for money. For example, robbery and theft. As result they did not have enough money to do so. Therefore, they get a good skill, so that they can makes more money, and no needs to commit crime against community. |
| Prisoner is also has right of visitation, which they could receive some items like special food they never gotten in prison. Correction department are allowing the prisoner to received mail, but it is dangerous because for braining illegal items "drugs and other things could fail them." So the correction department is always aware, and it is very carefully to dealing with the prisoner during the mailing and visitors. |
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- Provide feedback on content first before form. If you emphasize grammar over meaning, the students will end up correcting surface errors instead of making changes that clarify meaning. If the student writes multiple drafts, you may want to leave the grammar feedback for the last draft.
- Mark only a few salient errors at the time. Receiving a paper full of corrections may be overwhelming and discouraging for the student. You can, for example, choose to mark errors that interfere with meaning in one draft and run-ons and fragments in a subsequent draft.
- Only use grammar terms when pointing out error patterns in a recent immigrant student’s writing if he or she seems to understand these terms. Not all recent immigrant students will be familiar with grammar terms. Try to tailor your comments to the student’s level of grammar knowledge.
- Advise students to monitor their own writing with an editing checklist based on their most frequent errors. You can refer students to a tutoring center for English learners or the writing center at your college for help with this.
- Encourage all students, native and non-native speakers alike, to keep vocabulary logs for your discipline. A log of key terms with definitions and their use in context may accelerate the students’ learning of specialized vocabulary and its appropriate usage. Letting the class know that there is vocabulary that everybody has to master when they start studying a new discipline will give non-native students a confidence boost.
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Foreign Students
Recent
Immigrant Students