Teaching in a Writing Center Fall 2019

Some other people have commented on that balance between commenting on macro or micro  (global or local) issues in writing. While the pedagogical shift is certainly toward focusing more on macro levels of thought, I have found in my tutoring sessions that my students would way rather have me deal with micro level critiques. They would way rather have me point out every single grammatical error than to sit down and have a discussion about something more conceptual. I have also found with the few english language learners I've worked with, that they are even more interested in doing things "correctly." Going along with what Kyle said, it is especially difficult to navigate this terrain with the instructor is emphasizing the opposite. In my cases recently, the instructor has emphasized the grammar and my student has come in very focused on the grammar in her essay rather than what seems to me to be way larger structural issues. I think grammar feels easier to deal with. Ther...

Reading through Fei's case study, I was struck, like others have said, by the different rates of improvement in linguistic vs. logical/rhetorical areas. But I was also struck by Fei's own sense of her improvement in her writing over two years — keeping in mind that she wanted certain things out of the Writing Center that aren't necessarily what it's intended to provide — and how her own self-assessments compared / contrasted with what her tutors reported (using sources, expressing and connecting ideas, using feedback to revise globally were some areas where those assessments differed, for example). It made me think about something I've been noticing in my Writing Center students, as well as my students in Interpretation of Literature: self-awareness! Or lack thereof. Sometimes, students can absolutely point to an area that they know they need to work on, and it's just a matter of giving them the tools and advice they need to go forth and prosper, etc. Other time...

I'm interested in how this study interacts with my own experiences instructing non-native English speakers--particularly as it relates to Fei's personal associations with English as a subject matter. So often our roles as Literature instructors is to cultivate a personal investment in the subject matter on the part of the student. Fei indicated that she associated English curriculum with rigid academic writing, and at odds with reading or writing she might do for pleasure or on her own time. This concerns me as an instructor because I worry that the structure we've put in place for non-native English speaking students is one which reinforces negative connotations/fears/phobias they may already have anticipated or expected at the prospect of taking our classes. How do we, as writing instructors and educators, enable our students to succeed academically without contributing to the impression of English as a purely Academic/Laborious language?

While reading Fei's case study, what struck me the most about it was that Fei, as a student, was far and beyond more of an "ideal" student than most of the students that I have taught. Her dedication to English as a language--especially with it being her third language !--was staggering to me, especially in how she made it a point to primarily only read and use English while in the USA. I also found Fei's offense in some of the choices in commenting intriguing, as in my experience, my students whose first language isn't English are thrilled that someone has finally explained the grammatical rules to them. My question would be, which manner of commenting would you all recommend in cases like Fei's, or with domestic students who, like Fei, are "too lazy" to read their work aloud and send it to online tutoring instead (which, frankly, I understand and relate to, so please know I am not attempting to denigrate Fei!) ?  I ask because I tend to do commen...

I think what was learned in Fei's case study echoed sentiments I've heard in Gen Ed Lit colloquium, in that teachers should focus more on macro-level comments (rhetoric) vs. micro-level comments (grammar) in students' papers. We were told that because students can assign an equal level of importance to both types of comments, comments on organization/logic/analysis would be more helpful to them in the long-term. While it does seem that Fei "gamed" the system a bit and didn't learn as much as she could have, since she went back to China, maybe in the end the rhetorical/logical/analysis improvement was more important anyway! I was particularly interested in how both Fei and the Bedford Guide chapter reiterated the problem of students' limitation of time, especially given all their other social/academic/lifestyle concerns. I was surprised that Fei didn't like when tutors gave explanations for their changes or explained grammar rules, but it makes sense...

The section of the case study that most resonated with me centered on how second language learners increase complexity in their clauses and writing. Severino and Prim write, “Complexity often involves more risk-taking and therefore the possibility of making more errors in sentence structure, which are usually counted both by researchers and teachers as grammar errors” (161). My sense is that more and more teachers of composition and rhetoric courses understand that it is more important to attend to global rather than local issues. Ideally, this approach liberates language learners to experiment and take those risks necessary for complexity building. I do wonder, though, how we can communicate to instructors in other fields that this is the best pedagogical approach. There are certainly instances (some recounted in the case study even) in which writing centers/tutors find themselves working toward opposite aims from those of instructors (who overemphasize local issues...

Fei's case study fascinated me. I wonder if incorporating repeat assignments (invitations) and reflective self-assessments on writing would help raise our students' awareness about some of the issues the case study reveals: the granular focus on grammar, the reluctance to take and make time for multiple drafts and levels of revision, the difficulty in understanding the chaotic, nonlinear nature of improvement. I don't blame Fei for refusing to make "got worse" about any aspects of her writing on the survey. This shows she has internalized the very American normalization of linear progress, a mythic heavyweight among sociocultural forces. She also commodifies time and resists explanation from others (uptake of individualism?) These implicit, even  insidious, narratives structure the public relations challenge of any writing center: it's okay to slow down, collaborate, and learn through mistakes at any stage of the learning and writing processes. The writing ce...

I don't have any experience tutoring writing for international students, though I do have some experience helping international students find academic research. With the students I've worked with, I have always felt very conflicted leading students to the dense academic writing their assignment requires when the student is still learning english. Even the native english speaker struggles with understanding academic writing.  I appreciate that for a lot of first years, professors don't always expect students to write in an "academic discourse,"  but they are often exposed to it an asked to interpret it for their assignments.  In some discussions I've had with international students, they've even noted how the academic writing they know is different, particularly when it comes to the rules of citation and ideas of intellectual property. The article discussed something I've been thinking about in my tutoring sessions (and I am not working yet with any ...

One of the consistently difficult aspect of the tutoring so far has been attempting to address the grammar issues of my non-native English speaking student when the higher order ideas she's attempting to communicate are not entirely clear. Difficulties with tense and article usage have been particularly common in her work, as have difficulties making the relationship between ideas clear. Clarity is, of course, something all of the writing center students struggle with, but with the non-native English speaking student who is struggling to figure out how those ideas relate conceptually as well as how to articulate them on the page the difficulty is doubled. I often ask her to write through her thought process, which usually yields more clarity for us both, but makes our progress slow-going which I anticipate will be increasingly frustrating for her as the semester progresses since the rate of writing assignments will only increase.

Reading about possible language transfers (positive and negative) that can come up when working with Chinese students, I was reminded of a really cool thing one of my Chinese students taught me during our first week of class. My first week of teaching, as a get-to-know-each-other activity, I had my students go around and tell me about their random obsessions, useless skills, surprising things they happen to know a lot about. One student, who is Chinese, lit up when she said her "useless skill" was deciphering the nuances between similar Chinese characters by noticing how their differences in appearance mirrors the differences in their meaning. I asked if she could give an example, and she gave a really awesome demonstration of some characters that denoted different quantities/arrangements of trees. The class was super into it, and it was a great way to illustrate how the act of close reading/interpretation/analysis can take many forms. I realize the way I framed the initial...

While doing the readings, I was struck by how much of what was discussed about working with international students had been reflected in my own work as an instructor here, and in my tutoring sessions so far. One of my students is from Vietnam, and since Vietnamese sentence structures are oftentimes longer, she and I had to work on cutting her sentences in half. Last semester as well, I had a student who was Chinese and whose writing style reflected everything in the handout. So, I wish that instructors received copies of this as well, since it would make cross-cultural editing practices much more fluid. My questions for today: What do you do when you encounter a situation where neither you nor the student has any idea of how to "translate" what they are trying to say? I've encountered this a bit and found that having them tell me what they're trying to say works, but it isn't always successful. This is less a tutoring question and more of an instructing ques...

These readings remind me how incredibly un-intuitive, rigid, and arbitrary the English language. The clearly patterned systems of suffixes for marking person and tense conjugations in Spanish wow me with their parsimony. The tiny bits of Chinese I've learned through language-learning apps and my Uncle Ricky's wife from China, Yuhong, as well as from their tiny yet fluently bilingual children, also awes me. The syntactical flexibility of Mandarin and proliferation of adjectival markers for classes of things makes vocabulary and tonal pronunciation key rather the transformation and relative placement of words. I could master that! It's more muscle memory than procedural piecing together of sentences.  The cause of some English confusion creeps in from the other language I'm most familiar with that lends so much to English, French. It follows similar patterns to its sister Romance language Spanish-- except pronunciation of many of the suffixes is not distinct! How does any...

The section in the case study in which we learn that Lin was unfamiliar with events such as Stonewall, reminded me of an epiphany I had during my own teaching a few years ago. I regularly teach a short unit on revisionist fairy tales. After the second semester of doing this, I realized that I needed to assign the original versions before the revisions. I would assign texts such as Anne Sexton’s “Cinderella” and have students compare her version with their ideas about earlier incarnations of the tale, such as the Disney film. I had assumed that students would at least be familiar with Disney versions, but not all students, including international students, are familiar with Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood, for instance. Following one class, an international student approached me and asked me to explain Little Red Riding Hood. I realized that I hadn’t considered how culture-bound my texts were and that I had been placing some of my students at a distinct disadvant...

"If communication and content are interdependent, and communication is about unfamiliar content in an unfamiliar language, how can that communication not suffer?" I keep thinking about this logically multi-layered question in the Crossing Cultures piece. It reminds me of a tutoring session I observed in which the student was writing about gun control and started with something like, "Gun violence is an epidemic"--but epidemic where? It wouldn't make sense to a student from Europe or parts of Asia with strict gun-control laws or basically... anywhere except the United States. It would be a good rule of thumb for writers to think, "Would the way I write about X make sense to anyone?," which is a good way of enforcing clarity and context when translating thoughts into words and ultimately leading to the larger question of, "What is the universal story/question/understanding here?" One transfer problem I've noticed in Chinese students...

"For writers...who are just getting started on an assignment, it can be tremendously helpful- and relieving- to consider the writing process as a series of smaller, manageable tasks rather than one, huge, seemingly impossible undertaking." This chapter made me consider the way that assignments or just writing in general is often presented in classes and by professors. It seems like a big role of the writing tutor is to break down these massive assignments into smaller pieces. I love what Kyle said in an earlier post about writer's voices and encouraging students to simply start the process of writing by having a conversation. When I look back on myself as an undergrad, I think I saw things like brainstorming or freewriting as kind of like "tips" and "extra" things to do,  rather than as vital to the process of writing. I think I needed to wrap my mind a bit around the difference between  doing something on the side versus  breaking down the whole w...

"As many recent articles in Writing Lab Newsletter and Writing Center Journal have discussed, errors are important to L2 writers ... On the other hand, don't do all the work for them; they should participate in the editing process--in identifying and correcting problems." Working with a non-native English speaking student and a native English speaking student back to back really exemplified some of the problems the manual is attempting to address, namely that it can be difficult to quell the impulse to dive in and correct the errors in a student's work, rather than walking them through the origin of the error and how to prevent it in the future. Given the constraints of our time during a typical writing center shift, allowing the time it takes for a student to puzzle through a sentence that lacks clarity due to a minute error can feel like squandering. That said, I think about the times in my own education that due to misunderstanding or ignorance I've perpetuat...

I’m so glad to see such wonderful and insightful posts from you all about working with international and ESL students, because it’s something I’ve also been thinking about a lot in terms of some of my ESL students in my Interpretation of Literature class, who I think could really benefit from Writing Center tutelage! One student’s reading responses, in particular, embody many of the grammar/syntax issues we’ve been reading and talking about — the ideas are there, but her clarity of expression is impeded by the difficulties of this language. I can only imagine how incredibly frustrating it must feel to know what you want to say, but be struggling with how to say it (I look like half a semester of Italian in college, but dropped it because it was too hard, lol; non-native English speakers don’t have that luxury).   Another international student’s reading responses, on the other hand, demonstrate the ability to put a sentence together in a way that makes sense—but I can ...

Within my readings for this week, I was particularly struck by the chapter on voice and audience. I was actually thinking about the same quote Lei did in her post: " “Good readers usually recognize a problem, though they may not always be able to explain it technically." Since I grew up only speaking English, this is a problem I've run into in my own life, and with my own students. So, I just want to second that thought as well! My question is actually quite similar to hers: What do we do if we have a student actually asking us for more technical grammatical advice, and while we are able to tell them what the fix is, what would you recommend aside from, "Oh, it just works"? I've found saying "Oh, this sounds more natural" is good enough for students, or asking them to read their work aloud, but that definitely doesn't hold up in terms of how grammar works. If it did, the English language would be far less messy! Another thing as well: If we h...

The section of this week’s chapter that reflects on voice and audience most resonated with me. Ryan and Zimmerelli instruct, “To improve the voice of the paper, ask the writer, ‘Do you talk like this?’” (40). I’ve noticed over and over again in my Interpretation of Literature classes that students regularly say brilliant and insightful things during our discussions. The second that blank page stares them down from across the computer screen, though, these same students struggle to articulate. In most cases, I suspect that they feel they must translate their great thoughts into academese. They have imagined an audience for their writing that will only accept complex syntax and academic jargon. Over the last year or so, I’ve increasingly encouraged them to begin writing without writing at all. Rather, I’ve told students that one way to begin writing (or pre-writing) is to record on their phones either a conversation with a friend or just themselves talking alone. This ...

Carol's chapter on serving ESL (or EOL or ELL or, probably best, non-native English speaking) students brought up questions that Lei just wrote about, as well as some from my critical anthropological stance regarding multiculturalism. Point six of the chapter suggested that to "better create a multicultural writing center...[y]ou can start by making your center sound and look multicultural and international." While "you can start"is surely key to Carol's thinking, I was still troubled by the superficial nods to multiculturalism this paragraph suggested. Diverse foods and international decorations, along with "traditional dance" in parades, are often signs of the a state or organization paying mere lip service to diversity or multicultural. These aren't bad on their own, and I think the WC here does a wonderful job making a hospitable atmosphere. However, making a more complete shift to a place that fully embraces multiculturalism and other form...

“Good readers usually recognize a problem, though they may not always be able to explain it technically.” This line from the writing process chapter struck me as a big difference between native and non-native speakers, and a challenge in tutoring. As someone who grew up mainly with English, I usually don’t have to think about why something works technically or grammatically; I rely on that all-magical ear, like natural musicians who never learn how to read notes. And yet a non-native speaker or a less avid reader/writer would need things to be broken down and explained piece by piece. This applies not only to lower-order grammar issues but also to higher-order organizational skills: how do you teach a way to think that comes instinctively to you but might not for the student? My favorite part of the writing process is brainstorming and getting the initial thoughts down, as well as coming up with a structure for the writing. My least favorite part is actually getting the w...

Hello, Here are my questions about Bedford and WC. 1. The Bedford guide discourages us from suggesting the grade a student is likely to get on their paper, which I think is wise! However, we'll all have our own internal opinions about whether a student's work is strong or not, which is of course what we base our feedback and advice on. But I'm wondering: What if a student follows our advice to a T, but the paper still receives a poor grade? Which is another way of saying: What if we give bad advice? 2. I've heard mixed information about how likely it is that current GEL instructors will be able to swap out one of their classes in spring semester for WC hours. Also, just wanted to confirm that the salary is the same? See you all soon! EmmaJean

In the Bedford Guide, particularly in the second chapter, the role of the writing center tutor seems to be deciding when to provide explicit instruction and suggestions to a student, and asking leading questions that provide the student the space to arrive to revision suggestions on their own. How, as a writing tutor, do you learn to strike and maintain a balance?  Throughout the Tutor Guide, there seems to be an emphasis on individualizing the program to meet the specific needs of the student. I'm curious about how to negotiate regional and cultural differences that may emerge to impact the writing of a student. How do you navigate providing instruction that follows the parameters of academic conventions, without stifling the student's individual style or voice--particularly if that style or voice is emerging from regional or cultural backgrounds the tutor/instructor doesn't share?

Hello All, Here are some questions for class today. :) 1) It was interesting reading about the "many hats" tutors wear. I particularly liked the bit about being a collaborator with the writer, helping them think through ideas and offering your own. It strikes me as being a really authentic way to engage someone. As the book points out, this could also become a problem if the writer relies on your ideas more than their own or if the tutor is "overzealous" (haha).  I suppose it entirely depends on the writers you are working with, but I'm interested to see how many students come in, as the comic in chapter 2 suggests, simply to have someone else do most of the work for them and how to navigate that as a tutor, while acknowledging that some people just aren't as interested in a topic or a class in the same way you might be. 2) I'm curious how many students in the enrollment program are in it because they are enrolled in Rhet 1010: writing for aca...

Hello, everyone! I hope you all had a lovely Labor Day weekend. Today is my first day on the job for the WC, and I am super excited! However, like Rachel, I seem to have misplaced my syllabus. Still, my gushing aside, Here are my thoughts on both readings: Within The Bedford Guide to Writing Tutors, I did, in fact, find much of the advice to be helpful. However, I would also like to echo Kyle's question about laptop usage as a tutor. I tend to do my work digitally, and it is also far easier to edit things in terms of writing things and moving around paragraphs if need be. Meanwhile, one thing that struck me is the fact that try as a student may, we may not give them grade appraisals. Seconding Rachel, I was greatly surprised by the kind of detachment they seem to laud for "professionalism," when the process of tutoring, as they rightfully point out in the "many hats" section, contains so much personal interaction. When in my experience at The College of Woos...