Foreign Students who cannot write English beyond a 5th grade level

[nwman2830]

I have been learning English since I moved to the US at age 17 after growing up in a non-English speaking country. I was admitted to ESL programs in junior year of high school and college. After I completed the ESL study, I was admitted full-time undergraduate for BS in CS. I wrote a lot of English essays but saw a lot of corrections to my grammar structure. One of the key areas was proper use of tenses and articles. Other languages have less tenses than English and do not have articles. There are some rules but English bends them often. Articles such as a, an, the is one of them. The rules say you usually precede nouns with a, an when mentioning a countable object that can be one of many. You use "the" when referring to something already mentioned or specific in general. However there are times when you do not use them and this is where it gets confusing. It will be never possible to perfect English for somebody whose first language is not English.

Also classroom English in most schools seriously lacks many things found in the street language. These include slangs, idioms and contractions. I found many native speakers of English do not want to maintain close relationship with non-native speakers of English. That closes an opportunity to practice when they are shut and they all have left is TV, books but nobody to talk to but people who speak their language at home. Writing is connected to speech, lacking consistent deep practice in one of them interferes with learning. Before you criticize people who are trying to assimilate but their English is second language and are not able to fully integrate into society, look at yourself in a mirror. Do you let them come to you and offer them feedback or help? Have you ever studies abroad in a country that does not speak your native language and tried to befriend locals? Has it been easy? I wonder if you really know these international students who you judge.