Me be bi-lingual too. It's a real and true advantage to teaching/learning any language. The problems a FL student may have are too many to mention, but I consider these key to knowing what his/her obstacles are: Listen to
their English and see where their mistakes are (Thai, the s for plurals, etc). At that point you'll get a window to their language. Ease their fears by giving them an example of just how badly you speak their language. Be a friend to them, even a parent. Remember the core of natural learning; you learned your language from someone who cared for you. Have fun with learning, as you did learning your L1.
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far more than the "osmosis/immersion learning" (mythical) factor that gets mention once in a while on this board
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Full of shit once again. I known plenty of people in about five foreign nations who spoke perfectly well, understood well and had never studied. They learned from movies and music. Immersion is a myth? You mean a FL student living in an English speaking nation would absorb the target language at the same rate as an EP student?
I worked with monolingual Mexicans in America. Some had been there 30 years and knew very little, some for a short period and knew a lot. Need, need. There are Spanish language radio stations, TV, books, anything a Spanish speaker could ask for .. if he wanted to remain as he arrived it's all there. Some have a need to assimilate, some didn't. They say if you want to learn the tongue of your host nation, do it quick. Once you're there for two or three years your need just may drop. Not having any admiration for a people will slow you down too. Not knowing shit about your own language will slow you down as well. It is not a question of osmosis, because that's the passing of fluids through tissue, that's a physical phenomena. We say osmosis because we can't explain language acquisition with a term that isn't at least a sentence long.
So all you exchange students out there .. come back home and tell your parents they wasted their money.