subject: Universities should provide more English language support such as ESL Proofreading [print this page] Universities should provide more English language support such as ESL Proofreading
English proofreading and language tuition support should be given to international students with English as a second language coming to the US, UK, Canada and Australia to study. These services should be made more easily available by university but budget constraints and the resource requirements these involve mean ESL students must look elsewhere to companies like YourPerfectEnglish who provide English ESL proofreading.
In many respects, UK universities should be offering international students with English as a second language, services such as these in-house but they are not. I have spoken to many university lecturers who have said that universities should do more to help students improve their English instead of simply grading papers and handing them back to them. However, the simple truth is it would be too costly and perhaps they could not offer the service as well as companies like Your Perfect English Proofreading can.
Everyone knows English is a fairly tricky language to get to grips with. Mostly due to its rather strange grammatical conventions and the fact that it's not phonetic (i.e. words do not sound as they are written). However, it's not the most difficult either. Consider this: it takes a non-native about 600 hours of practice to be able to hold a basic conversation in English compared to 1600 hours for Mandarin Chinese!
Another difficultly for many ESL international students studying in English speaking countries is the tendency for universities to group them together in student residences. The idea behind this is that it will make the settling in process easier. The negative by-product of this is that it means these students spend a large amount of their time speaking in their native tongue as most of their neighbours will be from their home country.
Perhaps one way of improving this situation for the benefit of ESL international students is to assign each student a native study buddy' who can help develop the English language abilities of the ESL students.
Until then at least, thankfully we have people who are providing English proofreading - a helping hand for ESL international students!
