Sofia Rositani — Reporter
The bilingual department has been struggling to get tutors into the Academic Success Center to assist bilingual students resulting in students having to seek out other tutors or forms of help with their studies.
Students who did not learn English as their first language are strugging not only in but outside of class as well.
According to Nichole Barbieri, the associate director of the Academic Success Center, there is a bilingual writing and comprehension tutor who is at the Academic Success Center two days a week.
These days including, Monday from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., and Wednesday from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
There is also an embedded tutor who is in the English 119 course.
“We need to see how much the service is being used because right now the bilingual tutor isn’t extremely busy seeing a lot of students so the more students she sees the more we are able to grow,” said Barbieri.“We will have to reassess at the end of this semester and see how much would she utilize if she was busy all of the time then maybe we need to increase it to two or three tutors to see how many students we can help. But as of right now we seem to be in a place where she is able to manage all of the students let in”
Regarding the future of tutors at academic success center.
“I genuinely think that is Southern is going to be accepting of students who are English second language learners or those who don’t yet have a well developed understanding of English there should be intervention at the admissions level on helping them get more comfortable in English, i’m a student I can’t really teach you the English language in a half hour or hour and I just think Southern needs to do more as an institution to help these students instead of putting it on student workers because again I don’t have it in my full range to be able to give these students what they necessarily need so I think there should be more of an introductory English courses to help bilingual students but I don’t see that happening,” said English major Elise Ryan, a senior who is a writing tutor for Access Success Center, she is not in any form a bilingual tutor but has been teaching bilingual students.
According to Ryan, “it’s more difficult when you don’t have experience dealing with bilingual students or ESL students to know what to do, so it causes a lot of confusion on both ends.”
Ryan has also said an influx of bilingual students needing help but it has been proven to be difficult for some because their comprehension with English causes a difficult work environment since the tudors have no training to work with them, and the student is struggling.
