All through high school I worked as a peer tutor, first for students that were from the area and needed assistance in basic high school courses like history and math. These courses were not the main focus of my interests but I understood them well enough, as well as the basic way I myself understood them and how others could use my techniques to learn, and I felt that I could apply that in a manner that would benefit the peers I worked and studied with. As my interest in Spanish began to develop (French and Spanish were the only classes offered at my school and we were only allowed to take one or the other; any other languages I took were through a newly implemented online program, and I sampled a little of Chinese and Italian) a favorite Spanish teacher of mine that had noticed my aptitude for languages kept approaching me and asking me to tutor kids that were having a hard time in her Spanish classes. It was about eighth grade when I started working with a seventh grader who needed help specifically with his Spanish. For some people, learning other languages is a particularly difficult subject, regardless of how they perform in any other classes. There are links between less mathematical classes and language courses, but not really enough to draw specific conclusions. For most people that start learning another language beyond the age of six or seven (when most scientists agree this period ends), learning another language is significantly more difficult than it would have been if they were three or four. This also helps to explain why younger children pick up speech at such an incredible rate, despite the fact that the rules of grammar are way beyond the scope of their comprehension. They literally just begin to understand it.

I wasn’t working very long tutoring other students in Spanish before the ELL teacher of my school approached me and asked if I would be willing to help in her classroom with kids from other countries. Initially I was confused, as she didn’t speak any languages of the kids there, and I soon found out that I didn’t either—all four of them speaking either Russian or Turkish—but the teacher twisted my arm a little and pulled me out of my comfort zone and the next week I started coming during my study period at the end of the day. At the time, it the fact that there is a best period of life to start learning another language didn’t factor in at all to the fact that I was going to be working with these kids, but it soon became painfully apparent that there were some language barriers these kids just didn’t understand, as well as things that they might not pick up, being that—regardless of the fact that they were learning English here as well—there are certain colloquial and non-colloquial grammar and speech things in English (as there are in any language) that really can’t be taught by a book. Four years of working with these kids gave me an appreciation of that I don’t think I would have gained anywhere else.

The teacher initially placed me with Yagmur, a girl who technically should have graduated if she was back in Turkey, but she and her younger sister had come here with her parents because of her father’s job and she was set back in school because all of the studies here were about American culture and history. (The teacher introduced me to a boy named Yah-yah at first (which is the Turkish version of John, fun fact) but decided right befor I began that she would give me a student focused on her studies more than Yah-yah was, so I could get the hang of working with people that didn’t speak English without having to fight them on doing their work as well).

Yagmur and I worked together for a couple of hours a week before I had to go to my job after school. What I was there for was mostly translation and explanation. Really tough subjects like biology, which were laid out in very scientific terms in her books, were much easier for her to understand if I could comprehend the English and then draw an example, or pantomime, or interpretive dance in order to help her. Part way through my junior year of high school and about four months in with working with her, the scheduling of my job changed and I didn’t have to leave school every day for another hour and a half. I met with Yagmur every day for over two and a half hours during this time, and because we had so much more time, I started playing games with her and the other kids there, as well as helping the other kids with their work. Being thrown head first into so many hours with these people, I picked up on the fact that there were many things about the English language they just couldn’t understand, and had to adjust the way I spoke pretty quickly or things would get lost along the way. For example, when Yagmur and I worked on writing assignments for her classes, we would do the work of the material conjunctively, but it took her so long to copy it over to her paper (from the practice paper littered with mistakes and corrections), because she couldn’t retain the information and the translation long enough, and the work started to look like pictograms to her that she was just drawing over and over again, that I would read the work aloud to her and dictate it so she could finish before the end of the day came. Doing this, though, came with other issues. She couldn’t tell when sentences ended or began, concentrating so hard on how to spell the words in a different alphabet from her own, that she often took entire paragraphs down as one sentence. When I noticed this, I would say “point” at the end of a sentence to help, but when I wasn’t paying attention, I’d say “dot” or “period” by mistake, and then realize a couple words later that she’d written the word out on the paper instead of making a period.

ELL students’ studies are exhausting. The subjects, tough to understand already—regardless of the fact that half of the subjects are comprised of almost entirely new material because of the country’s history—are incredibly draining for kids that must also extend their energy into simply understanding the language these difficult subjects are taught in. I acted as the barrier for these kids, translating and transcribing things for them when they really couldn’t handle any more information going through their minds at the end of the day. The act of studying in another country after such a jarring displacement, like moving your entire family across the globe, is a herculean effort and I admired those kids like no other. When I study abroad, because my main focus will be somewhere along the lines of teaching—whether it’s ELL teaching, teaching English in another country, teaching in an impoverished area of the US with largely different ethnic backgrounds, or simply teaching Spanish or Chinese in an area similar to here—I really want to focus on the experience of studying somewhere that I don’t quite feel comfortable with a language that I’m not entirely fluent in. I want to place myself in the shoes of these ELL students and try to understand what they were experiencing so that I can better the way I interact with them if I ever continue something like my tutoring in the future. I am currently looking into an internship with that same teacher, who works in the elementary schools of the area as well as the high school, because I would have time before their school year ends after graduation. After looking at the experiences of other people who have studied abroad, I am excited to see if the way I interact with these students will change, and then again how it will change after I return from studying abroad, because I will be doing China as well as Spain, which has a very different culture from both the US and Spain.