Julie-Ann Stodolny wrote:
>Hi everyone,
>
>I was just wondering if any of you who work in Writing
>Centres would mind answering the two questions below.
>I just want a bit of input so I can tailor our Inkshed
>presentation a bit more (although some answers would be
>appreciated even if you're not attending Inkshed).
>
>Thank you,
>Julie-Ann
>
>1. Does your writing centre have a different policy for
>sessions with ESL students? By policies we mean
>areas/elements of writing that tutors focus on, ways of
>dealing with students, or any other “official” (or
>semi-official) policies. If your answer is yes, what
>are these differences?
>
>2. While most writing centres have policies of not
>editing students’ work, do tutors in your centre tend
>to do more borderline grammatical work when working
>with ESL students (whether by consciously or
>unconsciously going against policy)? We are not trying
>to find out about stated aims here; rather, we would
>like to know, in reality, how ESL tutoring sessions
>progress.
>
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Interesting questions, Julie-Ann. In our Writing Centre tutor-training
we discuss the tension between responding to student writing and
advising students on how to write. Is it fair to throw the students'
questions back at them if they really don't know how to correct a
grammatical error? On the other hand, if we tell students how to correct
all the grammatical errors, will they give up ownership of their own
text and let you tell them what they mean to say? This tension is
particularly difficult to reconcile with ESL students who tend to have a
lot of grammar errors in their writing which impede comprehension and
which the students find difficult to resolve on their own. In these
cases, I have tried to suggest to the writing tutors that a series of
guided questions with escalating specificity might be the answer. In
other words, if students don't hear any errors as they speak a sentence
out loud, they are asked to look at a specific area of the sentence, and
if they still don't see the mistake, they are asked to think about the
comma, or the particular word that is problematic. If all else fails,
and the grammar error is "macrological", then we end up telling them
what the problem is. If truth be told, however, most students get the
hint before we have to outright tell them the error. One interesting
area where we have determined that modelling sentences is very useful is
with ESL senior theses in Economics. We have a large contingent of
senior students from China whose main instructor is also Chinese. When
these students produce their senior thesis, they are sent to the Writing
Centre to help them clean up their English. We have an Economics major
in the Centre who helps them learn how to phrase their findings in a way
that is acceptable to that discourse community by modelling sentences
for SOME PARTS of the thesis: i,e, the Abstract, Introduction and
Conclusions.. Therefore, in answer to your first question, we don't have
a different policy for ESL and Canadian students, we just have different
techniques to deal with problems that arise.
In answer to your second question, again, the tutors are taught to deal
with the macrological problems before they get down to micrological
problems. . In other words, usually if a sentence is difficult to decode
it's because the student hasn't quite figured out what he/she is trying
to say, or is trying to "smush" two different ideas together (the same
as non-ESL students), or has patched together undocumented phrases from
sources that don't actually make a lot of sense. Usually, by the time we
deal with these higher-level organizational problems, the students'
macrological grammatical problems are also mostly dealt with, and the
time has been used up for the tutorial. I would think of the "borderline
grammatical" help as that help which focuses on use of prepositions and
defininte/ indefinite articles. These errors are obvious, but rarely
impede comprehension, so I tell my tutors not to worry too much about
such problems. When you ask about "in reality", I THINK this is really
the way that these sessions progress, and it certainly is the way my
sessions progress. However, in order to be sure of my position here, I
would have to do some research: i.e., video-tape and analyse actual
sessions that take place.
Hope this helps, and I look forward to hearing your paper at Inkshed!
Theresa.
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[log in to unmask] or, if you experience difficulties,
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For the list archives and information about the organization,
its newsletter, and the annual conference, go to
http://www.stu.ca/inkshed/
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