Week Three post
"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 perpetuated a pattern of error. A nuanced or straightforward mistake may be corrected one hundred times, as many of ours are these days by word-processing technology, and while on some level, in the moment, I will note the accuracy of the correction, when it's done for me, I never retain the lesson. It seems like part of the value of a one-on-one session versus a lecture style instruction is precisely to make space for a student to arrive at understand at their own pace, which I think is as true for a non-native English speaking student as for any student,
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 perpetuated a pattern of error. A nuanced or straightforward mistake may be corrected one hundred times, as many of ours are these days by word-processing technology, and while on some level, in the moment, I will note the accuracy of the correction, when it's done for me, I never retain the lesson. It seems like part of the value of a one-on-one session versus a lecture style instruction is precisely to make space for a student to arrive at understand at their own pace, which I think is as true for a non-native English speaking student as for any student,
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