Read Tutoring Second Language Writers Online
Authors: Shanti Bruce
Tutoring Second Language Writers (30 page)
Sue Hum recognizes our sometimes well-intentioned tendency to deal with difference in reading multicultural texts by one of two moves: we may read locally or we may read universally. We can apply this to reading international student writing. In a local reading, we concentrate “on the particular, contextual difference-centered details of a text” (
Hum 2006
, 462). So, for example, we notice differences in the use of articles, prepositions, or vocabulary. In a universal reading, we focus “on the commonalities we all share as members of the human race” (
Hum 2006
, 462), and thus we tend to read more globally for content and gloss over the local differences.
Helping students read and write critically, however, requires a more complex approach than simply deciding to work at either a global or a local level. A more balanced approach would be intercultural: it would search for individualized solutions guided by the goals and learning/cognitive preferences of the student and respect for the student’s starting place, the cultural and rhetorical traditions that may affect the writing. As one of the tutors at my writing center put it to me, “You’re going to have to adjust your tutoring style to every person that walks in the door.” Remember, too, that writers make choices, and sometimes the choices involve using language that resists the academic and English norms or that purposefully mixes or switches codes or language varieties, as described by Kevin Dvorak in this volume.
In writing centers, our bias is to work globally, sometimes at the expense of local issues, although when we work with L2 writers/speakers, doing so can be a struggle. Manuals often caution tutors to avoid starting with lower-order, or local, concerns (generally, sentence-level issues, grammar, and word choice) (
Bickford 2006
, 85), partly so tutorials do not get bogged down in editing before global issues are addressed. However, advice to the contrary, tutors often feel pressured to work on local issues. And maybe that’s okay. It’s natural for L2 writers/speakers to ask for help with the basic language skills usually associated with local concerns. Without skills such as the ability to read closely and quickly, students cannot meet the demands of their faculty to think critically. In a 1994 survey, L2 writers/speakers revealed they wanted to learn to process language more quickly and become more efficient readers and writers (
Leki and Carson 1994
, 91). Local work on vocabulary helps students learn to express the nuances of meaning available to fluent speakers.
Lun and others have suggested that a focus on vocabulary can help students who are experiencing problems with critical thinking tasks (
Lun, Fischer, and Ward 2010
).
Sarah Nakamaru points out the importance of addressing lexical problems.
Attention to language is often presented as editing or proofreading and is almost always equated with “grammar,” despite the fact that having access to and being able to effectively use English words and phrases (i.e., lexical knowledge/skills) is crucial to creating meaningful written texts in English. (
Nakamaru 2010
, 95)
David
Olson (1997)
explains why knowledge of English vocabulary can have a direct impact on critical thinking skills. Since critical thinking demands a reflective stance in which we use judgment to evaluate someone else’s writing (or speech) or thought, we need specific vocabulary that can express our attitudes, what
Olson (1997
, 500) dubs “talk about talk and thought,” and such verbs are to be found aplenty in English. His list of thirty includes verbs like
believe
,
know
,
mean
,
say
,
tell
,
assert
,
assume
,
claim
,
criticize
,
explain
,
imply
,
interpret
,
observe
,
prove
, and
suggest
(502). They are verbs that “provide the basic vocabulary for characterizing others’ mental states” (503); for example,
think
and
know
can be used to indicate agreement or disagreement with the cognitive state of another person—if we agree, we say he knows; if we disagree, we say he thinks—the choice of the assertive verb does not depend purely on the attitude of the person whose speech is being characterized but also on the attitude of the reporter of the speech act. (503)
As
Olson (1997)
explains, “To think about what another thinks and why is one important aspect of critical thinking” (496), so students need a more nuanced lexicon.
Because the concept of global and local can be so thoroughly integrated for L2 writers/speakers, prioritizing global concerns and dealing with them first may not be a productive approach (
Blau and Hall 2002
;
Cogie 2006
;
Myers 2003
;
Taylor 2007
;
Nakamaru 2010
). The assumption that local issues are extraneous and not as important to meaning as global issues was contested by Sharon Myers, who found that providing a word or “fixing” a tangled syntax both potentially affect meaning: “Whether or not an error is global or local depends first and foremost on its context” (
Myers 2003
, 62). Virginia Taylor found that tutors in her study did something along those lines as they moved between the local and global “fluidly and flexibly.” They “moved back and forth from rhetorical to linguistic foci in their discussions” (
Taylor 2007
, 61). According to Taylor (also,
Cogie 2006
), tutors must perceive the necessity of moving between the local and global and must understand that word choice, syntax, and other issues
often considered local can affect meaning and thus be more than surface features.
I interviewed six international graduate students in 2011, all former clients at the university writing center and all English language learners. None of them was interested in passively sitting back while a tutor corrected their work. They all wanted to learn to write acceptable, even excellent, English prose. All of them said working on local issues was helpful, although one of them had assumed the writing center could not help with global issues since with him, tutors never did, and another said that although he would have liked help with global issues, tutors often did not get there. He was reluctant to be too “aggressive” or “rude” in interrupting and redirecting the session (even though we stress that the client’s needs should come first). He explained that the best tutors provide “very direct feedback that gives options” and concluded that “one of the keys things I think for the consultant is to recognize the needs of the student. Because there are different things the student is coming in for, maybe flow . . . is the argument logical? . . . is the paper saying what they want to say or not? . . . If a consultant will be able to recognize the need of the student then this . . . would further elevate the writing center.”
Taylor (2007)
also found that undergraduate L2 writers/speakers she studied requested work on global issues and local issues in a somewhat balanced ratio.
Sometimes, tutors default to local issues because of pressures they put on themselves. When the tutor is an undergraduate and the student is a graduate student, the tutor may not feel capable of providing global advice because of a lack of expertise in the graduate student’s discipline. As Judith Powers warns, “In a situation where neither party fully understands the expectations of the discipline, working on sentence-level issues may be the only kind of work possible” (
Powers 1995
, 15). I interviewed ten experienced tutors in my writing center in 2010, and they told me they often moved flexibly between local and global issues when working with international graduate students. More than half of them described a process whereby a few sentences to a few paragraphs (with most favoring the paragraph unit) were read aloud, usually by the student, the same strategy noticed by
Blau and Hall (2002
, 42) in their study. Then the pair went back and identified and corrected errors, with the tutor explicating and guiding as needed. Tutors sometimes used this opportunity to bring attention to global or rhetorical issues such as audience, organization, or thesis support.
Unfortunately, the tutors sometimes felt anxiety about whether this was the sanctioned technique, and some did not recognize that focus on
the local might be as significant as focus on the global. One tutor was aware that some errors affect meaning more than others; she described a technique whereby she regularly asked students to explain orally what they wanted to say in writing at the beginning of a tutorial. Then, they began reading aloud and working on local issues as they went. The tutor used what she knew about the student’s local errors to clarify meaning. For example, if the student had particular trouble with definite articles, the tutor did not just provide the “right” one but used the process of collaboratively deciding on the proper article to ensure the student was saying what they really meant, a process that encouraged moving between the local and the global. The tutor saw the two as interdependent.
They need a lot of help with sentence structure, verb agreement, articles, those are very common things, but those things help them express themselves to say exactly what they want to say . . . sometimes even the verb tense or the agreement. Is that word really plural or not? . . . So it may sound like grammar but it really is the communication in particular in sentence structure, and if they have trouble getting sentence structure clear and concise, I often ask them, “Can you put the big idea right at the beginning, a simple subject-verb construction and then add what you need to it to get that across?”
Another tutor reported focusing every tutorial on global concerns by engaging in discussions about the content to set the tone and provide context for working on local issues since editing at every level depends on understanding the writer’s goals. A third tutor tried to avoid line-by-line editing with a questioning strategy.
With students who are unclear about their assignments or their organization or that sort of thing I’ll ask them first . . . “Do you want to read through this whole paper or do you want to just talk about it?” . . . I notice that it keeps me from line-by-line editing . . . and it allows me to focus on their thesis and their organization, so I’ll ask them to tell me what their thesis is and then ask them . . . to break it down into their arguments and then we’ll look through the paper for that.
In the end, letting the student guide the tutor is the best strategy. Do students need to fill in cultural background or work on enhancing those verbs that help them talk about the text?
It helps to take a little time at the outset of a tutoring session to get to know the student’s language and literacy background, learning preferences, and goals. Tutors also need to take a few minutes to understand the writing task and the writer’s approach. Tutors are often working on very tight schedules, and that can put pressure on them to Other students—assuming Asian students will defer to authority or
Arabic-speaking students will avoid directly stating a thesis up front can come from time pressure. It is important to skim over the draft and get the gist of the argument before delving into a sentence-by-sentence discussion of local issues. Tutors should also determine whether the writing is argument based or if the assignment requires critical thinking. Even reflective writing is often expected to display attributes of critical thinking, such as questioning the status quo or imagining a new perspective. Tutors should be looking for the elements of critical thinking in student writing while being aware that their presence or absence does not speak to the student’s intellectual ability alone but also to US academic expectations.
The National Council of Teachers of English recently advised instructors to make their assignments more culturally sensitive.
When designing assignments, instructors should avoid topics that require substantial background knowledge that is related to a specific culture or history that is not being covered by the course. Instructors should also be aware that sensitive topics, such as sexuality, criticism of authority, political beliefs, personal experiences, and religious beliefs, are subject to differing levels of comfort among students of different cultural and educational backgrounds. We encourage instructors to provide students with multiple options for successfully completing an assignment, such as by providing multiple prompts or allowing students to write in a variety of genres for completing the assignment. Instructors should provide clearly written assignments so that expectations are not left tacit. (
National Council of Teachers of English 2001
)
Writing centers have a central role to play in supporting students faced with assignments that do not follow these guidelines. When Yashvant and Julia discussed politics, Julia was serving as what Judith
Powers (1993
, 41) calls a “cultural informant,” a term explained in more detail in this volume by Michelle Cox.
Christine Fox’s 2003 case study of Ming, a junior-level Chinese immigrant student at the University of Rhode Island, illustrates another way tutors can help—by serving as cultural ambassadors. Ming received an assignment in a sociology class in which she was to discuss Buddhism as a “subversive science,” something that caused her to “struggle for weeks with the notion that Buddhism might be seen in U.S. culture as subversive” (
Fox 2003
, 71). Fox explains that understanding American culture was an ongoing struggle for Ming (also see examples cited by
Leki 2007
). A sympathetic tutor could help Ming accept that not all of
us believe such a statement and that, in fact, questioning it might be just the sort of academic move her professor would applaud.
The tutor can also help students tease out hidden expectations for critical thinking in assignments. Academic writing is almost always linked to critical thinking, even when it is not explicitly invited. In visiting various classes around our university to talk to students about journal writing, some of us in the writing center have discovered that when faculty are asking for “reflection,” they usually judge it not as personal expression but as a manifestation of critical thought, something they can evaluate. Typically, they want students to voice opinions or record experiences but also to relate these to the ideas brought out in class readings or discussion and provide support for ideas. If a student has issues with understanding spoken English or with reading highly academic writing, talking to a tutor can substitute for class discussion, and working with a tutor to understand a class reading could make a great deal of difference in meeting the expectations of such an assignment.
International students may also need orientation to typical American academic genres such as literature reviews, critical essays, and research papers, especially argumentative ones. Tutors can play a valuable role in helping students analyze assignments and explore the rhetorical strategies and organization required in various genres. If, for example, a student has been asked to reflect on a reading, the tutor may begin by examining the prompt or interviewing the student about what is meant by
reflection.
It may very well be that the student must get clarification from an instructor, and the tutor can also play a role in reassuring international students that doing so is perfectly appropriate.
Students who come from cultures with large power distance and low individualism might feel reluctant not only to clarify instructor expectations but also to express beliefs that might seem to disagree with the majority view or with the instructor’s view. As Fox explains, they may “fear that an honest expression of their religious or political beliefs, if different from those of their professors, will result in a poor grade” (
Fox 2003
, 131). Students may need explicit reassurance that disagreement is welcome, but tutors should explain how to express that disagreement in a scholarly tone, through argument and with evidence. If the tutor can determine the student does come from such a cultural background, helping the student find a more middle ground or use more conciliatory argument techniques (such as Rogerian argument, which seeks to start from common ground) might be the best path.
To help students with rhetorical strategies, spend time looking at sample writing. For graduate students, dissertations or research articles
are easy enough to find online. When undergraduates can supply a model, or when they can find a sample paper, such as a research paper in a handbook, this technique can work well for them, too. The analysis should be geared to helping the writer see the moves that are typical in academic and critical writing.
• What is the author’s stance and relationship to the audience?
• What verbs describe how the author evaluates other ideas or research?
• How are citations worked into the text?
• Does the author use first-person pronouns (especially if it is a coauthored work)?
• How are opinions and facts expressed?
• What kinds of evidence support the thesis (if there is one)?
• What is the thread of the argument and how is it presented to the reader?
• Can the writer look at something from multiple perspectives? Can they accurately describe other viewpoints?
The goal of this exercise is to expose tacit assumptions about the conventions of critical thinking.
It all comes back to what a student needs, of course. Ming typically had difficulty deciding on the level of detail to add to a paper; too much, she feared, would insult her professor’s intelligence, and sometimes she was unsure how much to elaborate on quotes or reluctant to add transitions. These are all problems Fox attributes to the Chinese writing style, in which it would be inappropriate to tell a reader something they already are presumed to know and to make implied connections between ideas so obvious you insult the reader’s intelligence (
Fox 2003
, 78–83). Tracing the thread of the argument and thinking about the author’s stance and relationship to the audience would probably help her far more than focusing on passive voice.