Read Tutoring Second Language Writers Online
Authors: Shanti Bruce
Tutoring Second Language Writers (21 page)
Examining Practice
Designing a Research Study
REBECCA DAY BABCOCK
Writing centers are rich sources of data tutors can probe for new insights and better practices for working with L2 writers. Research in a writing center begins with an idea and a plan for gathering and analyzing data. This chapter discusses some of the many research methods tutors can use in exploring the data gathered in their writing centers.
Perhaps you have been working with a student and have noticed moments of disconnect or other moments when the session went particularly well. When you are working with students, you may notice that some respond well to open-ended questions while others just sit and look at you when you ask a question, waiting for you to answer it yourself. Perhaps you are a multilingual person and you find that you and your tutee feel comfortable conversing in a language other than English, but you feel that somehow using a language other than English is wrong (see Dvorak’s chapter in this volume for more). Or perhaps you find yourself engaging in lots of small talk before the session begins and you feel that somehow this small talk is a waste of time, and you should be getting down to business since you are on the clock. All these are valid concerns. If you are a graduate or advanced undergraduate tutor, you probably already know that these types of concerns can be addressed by research, but you may not have experience with the exact techniques researchers can use to address them. The challenge for you is likely how to design a study and what methods to use.
Perhaps you are an English major and are mostly familiar with library research. If you have taken psychology, you may be familiar with studies using quantitative or qualitative methods. These
research methods
come in to answer the
research questions
that you develop through your experiences working with tutees. Many studies have been done already, but don’t
let that discourage you. All studies are opportunities to learn and to ask more questions. What are you interested in? This chapter will help you decide.
For example, I am interested in tutors who are nonnative speakers of the language they are tutoring, a topic that has been little researched. What learning takes place for L2 tutors? How do monolingual tutees perceive multilingual tutors? In studies of multilingual writers, the tutor is almost always situated as a monolingual native English speaker. Or if the tutor is bilingual, the researchers dismiss the tutor’s linguistic status, saying it doesn’t matter (see for instance
Weigle and Nelson 2004
). To me, an observation of a population of nonnative speaking tutors could produce worthwhile research questions, and from there, data collection and analysis could proceed.
Several scholars have discussed how interests, curiosities, or discomforts can inspire research questions. Nancy
Grimm (1999)
reported on a tutor’s discomfort with a tutee’s unconventional literacy practices, and this led eventually to a dissertation study. The tutor, Marsha
Penti (1998)
, decided to study the practices of a local religious group and how they interacted with the expectations of the university. Likewise, Gesa
Kirsch (1992)
wrote that unease or embarrassment about a teaching or tutoring situation can lead to productive research questions:
Research frequently begins with the urgency to understand events in the classroom or with a dissatisfaction with teaching methods. Instructional methods that work for one group of students may not work for another group. Mina Shaughnessy’s seminal work,
Error
[
s
]
and Expectations
, for example, grew out of the need to understand the new student population entering New York City colleges after the open admissions policy was introduced. (252)
These moments of discomfort or unease or simple curiosity can engender productive research questions. For instance, when Terese
Thonus (1998)
asked, “What makes a writing tutorial successful?” she was on her way to her dissertation topic. To conduct teacher research, you can observe your practice for moments of confusion or hesitation and formulate these as research questions. Tutor accordingly and keep a log of your experiences. Reflect on them.
Perhaps you want to know how tutors feel about tutoring multilingual students. You could use surveys, interviews, or even stimulated-recall sessions in which you record the tutoring session and show it to the tutor later, stopping the video at intervals and asking the tutor how he or she felt.
Maybe you have found yourself in a situation in which you and the tutee really just didn’t seem to click or didn’t understand each other.
The main research question in the
grounded theory
approach is “what’s going on here?” In this situation you could videotape your sessions and keep a log book of reflections. You could view your video and pick out moments of unease and share these with your tutee, asking what was going on for them at that moment. If you work together, this activity could also be a form of
action research
. You might learn a lot about politeness and cultural values as well. What to you is a polite request may be vague or meaningless to your tutee.
If I were to research the above topic, my research questions would be “how do L2 tutors benefit from their role and how do their tutees benefit?” I realize there is an element of evaluation in these questions because we must define
benefit
. Do I mean language learning? Satisfaction? Career advancement? I also need to determine how to best research this topic. I know I will need to interview or survey tutors and tutees. I probably must also observe their tutoring sessions. Perhaps I will design an action research study and involve tutors and tutees in determining the research questions, data collection, analysis, and write-up. If I decide to work with human subjects, I will need to contact the director of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at my institution to inquire about the procedures involved for acquiring permission to do research, which may vary by institution. If I work in a writing center, or a university or college in general, I can likely recruit participants just by asking them. A difficulty would be if there are no L2 tutors at my institution. In that case, I can try to approach another institution about collaborating with me on my research.
In trying to get a handle on designing your own study, it might be useful to look at the design of a published study.
Cumming and So (1996)
wanted to know what languages were effective in tutoring sessions and whether sessions on English writing needed to be conducted in English only. In order to answer these questions, they designed a quasi-experiment. They proposed a 2 × 2 study design in which tutors who were fluent in the languages of the tutees they worked with were asked to modify their tutoring under four conditions: the language used in the tutoring session (English or other) and the tutoring approach, error correction or procedural facilitation (meaning the tutors took the tutees through a series of questions designed to get them thinking about their papers, such as “Is this the right word or expression?” and “Does this part fit with the other parts?” [203]).
Tutors fluent in the respective languages participated in the tutoring sessions in English or in the student’s native language. Tutors were asked to conduct either a typical session of error correction or procedural facilitation with a focus on the writing process. Each of the tutees was assigned four tutoring sessions, one under each of the conditions. In all tutoring sessions, issues were identified, solutions were negotiated, and issues were resolved. The identifications were most often initiated by the tutors, but the negotiations were more equal, with 35–45 percent of the negotiations being led by students and 55–65 percent being led by tutors.
Cumming and So (1996)
found no real differences related to the use of English or the native language in the tutoring sessions. However, they observed that “utilizing the mother tongue appears to offer both tutors and learners a precise, meaningful way of guiding text revisions that is not available when tutors do not know learners’ mother tongues” (220). This finding is important since common sense may tell us that tutoring students who have written papers in English must be conducted in English, but according to these study results, tutors and tutees can feel comfortable conversing in whatever language works best for them.
Further questions raised by this study are related to Socratic questioning versus simple error correction and these techniques’ effectiveness or desirability. Future studies can look at the discourse itself rather than the language used, perhaps applying concepts from
conversation analysis
such as the IRF pattern (initiation, response, feedback) to transcripts of tutoring sessions (see
Mackiewicz and Kramer 2015
). This pattern was observed by
Sinclair and Coulthard (1975)
in their analysis of classroom talk as teachers often ask a question of a student, receive a response, and then evaluate the response.
Opportunities for research abound each time you have a question or observe something that makes you curious. I began the path toward my dissertation research when two deaf writers came into the writing center I was working at and no one knew how to tutor them. I even saw tutors shying away from tutoring them! A research question was born: how are tutoring sessions conducted between a hearing tutor and a deaf tutee? The answer was through interpreters, and our problem was that the interpreter we were using tended to intrude on the tutoring session rather than just interpret what was said by either party. I decided to conduct a
descriptive
study rather than an
evaluative
one since little previous research had been done on the topic. Before I could ask how best to tutor a certain population, I needed to know how they were currently being tutored as a starting point. In order answer this question, I needed to
observe
tutoring sessions, and as a memory device I decided to video record the sessions. I also knew I needed to
interview
the participants since I could not read their minds to know what they were thinking during the tutoring sessions. In addition, I decided to
collect
and
analyze
written documents such as student papers and tutor training manuals, first because
interview
,
observation
, and
collecting documents
are the “big three” data sources of qualitative research, and second because it would further enhance my understanding of what was going on (see
Babcock 2012
).
Interviews
can be
structured
,
semistructured,
or
unstructured
. In structured interviews, you ask all participants the same questions and do not veer from the script. In semistructured interviews, you have lists of topics to cover, but you can ask unscripted follow-up questions and follow the conversation if it veers in another direction. In unstructured interviews, you just talk and let the themes and topics emerge from the concerns of the participants. You can conduct your interviews in person, on the phone, by e-mail, or by text chat, Skype, or some other technology not yet invented! The ease of e-mail interviews is that you can just cut and paste your participants’ responses into your paper. In-person or phone interviews can be audio or video recorded with permission. The drawback to recording interviews is that you may be tempted to transcribe everything rather than just the salient quotes you want to include in your paper. Also, you may use a method of analysis in which you must have transcripts in order to code them (see below).
Observation
is important if you want to make general observations about the work that goes on in a writing center. Sit unobtrusively in a busy area and make notes. These will come in handy when you do your write-up. When you observe tutoring sessions, group sessions, or writing workshops, you may simply take notes or you may video or audio record the sessions. You may not even have to be present if you ask the participants themselves to start and stop the recorder for you. With camera uploads to Dropbox, you could get the videos instantly on your computer.
Collection of documents
can enhance your research or can be its main thrust. You may include analysis of student writing in your study design, or you may want to enhance your analysis by looking at tutor-training materials and writing center brochures and websites. You can also make an entire study out of rhetorically analyzing promotional and
educational materials. Make sure you save copies of documents found on the Internet, as these do not always stay put and it is frustrating when you want to go back to a document and it is no longer there.
Action research
is one way to involve your tutees, other tutors, director, instructor, and other stakeholders (like the writing center receptionist) in the process of formulating research questions, gathering data, analyzing it, and writing it up. Finally,
case study
is a popular and important method used in writing center research.
One way to begin action research is to keep a
log
of your tutoring sessions. As you read over your log, note moments in which things did not work as you expected. Terese
Thonus (1999)
noticed that sometimes tutors’ politeness strategies backfired because nonnative speaker tutees did not understand what the tutor wanted them to do since the politeness strategies the tutors used served to make their communication vague.
Action research may be a good choice if there is an issue your writing center community feels strongly about because “practitioner-researchers do not attempt to hide the social and political goals of their research, which, ultimately, are liberation and equality. In action research, the researcher and participants are partners in the process, and research goals are mutually determined and relevant” (
Babcock and Thonus 2012
, 38).
The editors of the
Action Research Journal
have put together a manifesto in which they write,
We acknowledge the complexity of social phenomena and the non-linearity of cause and effect and see that the best response to such complexity is to abandon the notion of understanding as a product of the enterprise of a lone researcher, and to engage local stakeholders, particularly those traditionally excluded from being part of the research process, in problem definition, research processes, interpretation of results, design for action, and evaluation of outcomes. (Action Research 2009)
This form of research is rare in the writing center world, although it should be more prevalent, especially since its view of collaboration reflects so strongly those of most writing center practitioners. In action research, all stakeholders participate in all aspects of the research. For
instance, the action research team may consist of students who use the writing center, tutors, administrators, and professors. The team will collaboratively develop research questions together, collect data, manage and analyze it, and prepare the final write-up. Perhaps this type of research is rare in writing center contexts because of the difficulty of arranging the schedules of large numbers of people.
A true study of this kind has not been published in the writing center literature, although
Horner and Jacobson (1985)
conducted the initial phases of an action research project and published the report as an ERIC document. More recently, Cathy
Hutchings (2006)
conducted what she termed an
action research study
at a multilingual and multicultural university in South Africa. Her investigation focused on linguistically and culturally diverse students, her methodology was
new literacy studies
, and her method of analysis was
grounded theory
. Hutchings looked at session reports and coded themes that she then entered into a computer program (NVIVO) in order to connect student demographic information (languages spoken, gender, academic rank) with consultants’ evaluations of student learning attitudes and behaviors.
In
Researching the Writing Center
(2012), Terese Thonus and I suggest a research study that focuses on L2 tutors themselves, on their knowledge and attitudes. Data collection could proceed through logs, journals, observations of tutoring sessions, interviews, observation of training sessions, and analyses of written materials. This would make a perfect action research study, with tutors driving the research and being involved in all aspects. An action research model would also include tutees, who could be interviewed alone or in focus groups and also asked to keep journals.
Action research can also be conducted by staffs who work together on a daily basis with writers. In
At the Point of Need
, Marie Wilson
Nelson (1991)
and a rotating group of graduate-student teaching assistants conducted teacher research in a program that paired small groups of basic and ESL writers with graduate-student tutors. Each semester, the graduate students met and discussed tutoring sessions and hypotheses about what went well and what did not, and from these meetings they brainstormed tutoring techniques such as the use of freewriting and putting students in charge of their own work. They then evaluated again, keeping what worked and rejecting what did not. The procedure went on for years, so the group slowly and steadily improved their practices. The group gathered data from comments from the students themselves, from log books, observations, phone calls, videotapes, discussions, research reports, and finally from Nelson’s own meta-analysis of the findings each group produced in successive years.