Tutoring Second Language Writers (4 page)

Angela is one of thousands, and perhaps millions of people worldwide who harbor ambivalent feelings about the need to learn and use English. On the one hand, they know learning English can create upward mobility for them and perhaps the members of their families. It can significantly increase the chances for better employment opportunities, scholarships, and access to the trove of information, literature, and scholarly journals available on the Internet. It also opens the door to the wealth of
prose and poetry in the Western canon. For these reasons, parents and grandparents of young people often encourage them to learn English. On the other hand, learners and their families may also know that learning English is not always necessary or even desirable. As the economies of their own countries prosper, many people around the world see that knowing English is only one alternative for achieving mobility (
Liu and Tannacito 2013
). Languages like Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and Spanish also create economic opportunity. And perhaps, they think, it is not necessary to learn an additional language formally, in school, because many people do just fine figuring out ways to communicate as they go along—on the job, in the laboratory, by using translator apps, or by watching television and playing video games. Multilingual tutors can probably think of many examples of how this figuring-out operates.

In chapter 11, Jose L. Reyes Medina writes with one of the most distinctive voices in the collection, probably because he feels so passionate about the topic of how he learned English. After coming to the United States, and while attending college, Reyes Medina tutored at Bronx Community College in New York. Since then he has set his sights on earning a doctorate in psychology. Most monolingual speakers probably never give much thought to the dedication it takes to learn a language well enough to earn a college degree with it. Americans may have studied a foreign language (typically Spanish, French, or German) in high school or college, perhaps spent a couple months studying abroad, or maybe visited a place where they tried to use the language to communicate with an indulgent waiter or souvenir dealer. But learning a language well enough to study at the college or graduate level, with native speakers and in their own country, is another thing altogether. And while becoming immersed in another language and culture provides unparalleled experiences classrooms cannot even begin to duplicate, the effect is often overwhelming and takes a heavy emotional toll, at least for a time. Learning a new language in this way involves sustained levels of self-motivation and sacrifice. There are also frequent setbacks that demand persistence and confidence. Reyes Medina’s chapter gives tutors a glimpse into what he did as an L2 student to learn English outside class and away from the writing center. His message is not boastful but is inspiring because it shows how much motivation Reyes Medina has and how much learning has already occurred. It may even cause monolingual tutors to begin learning another language. Doing so is rigorous but not impossible, and as Reyes Medina demonstrates, it is the accomplishment of a lifetime. Learning English made him a better tutor and a more thoughtful individual all around.

Part 4, “Academic Expectations,” narrows the focus of this collection to some of the specific demands school imposes on literacy. It describes how tutors can help writers negotiate these demands, bringing to mind two of the qualities of reflective thinking in Dewey’s philosophy of education: reflection requires interaction with others in communities and a disposition that favors personal and intellectual growth. The first few chapters in this section deal with key terms like
critical thinking
,
disciplinary writing
, and
self-editing
, terms that show up in many of the assignments and rubrics students struggle to understand.

In chapter 12, Valerie Balester begins this section of the book by posing a question that has an elusive answer: what is
critical thinking
? This term may be one of the most taken-for-granted notions in American higher education, appearing in course descriptions, college recruiting brochures, syllabi, and policies about assessing learning outcomes. Undergraduates no doubt discover it means one thing in one discipline and something else in another. International students may not be familiar with the term at all, which is not to say they do not think critically. Rather, the notion can seem strange to them, as in, “Critical thinking—is there any other kind?” In a thoughtful and wide-ranging chapter, Balester invites tutors to look outward and see how the idea of critical thinking translates to academic settings elsewhere. Balester’s exploration of this concept has important practical applications too, as it demonstrates times when tutors must explain things that can seem obvious to insiders but confounding to everyone else. In these cases,
Blau and Hall (2002)
say, tutors must be cultural informants. Those who are not deeply familiar with American culture are often confounded by highly specific cultural references like
cowboy mentality
,
KKK
,
yard sale
, or
subs and suds
.

These responsibilities—looking outward to other disciplines and being a cultural informant—begin with another hallmark of reflective thinking: having a disposition toward personal and intellectual growth, both for oneself and for others. When Balester stresses that certain ideas and events are difficult for international students to navigate, she does so because it can appear that students are shy, withdrawn, or “just don’t get it” when in fact they have no point of entry into the topic of conversation. Stepping outside the cultural bubble requires an openness to discovering things about one’s own culture that are taken for granted and a willingness to participate in the give and take of conversations about sensitive topics. Orienting one’s tutoring sessions around ideas relevant to students’ experiences and approaching new information in an open-minded way go hand in hand with reflective thinking.
These approaches are particularly valuable when uncovering the source of confusion and misunderstanding.

Understanding what it means to enter the conversation is an aspect of intellectual growth for tutors and writers. It is the reason instructors insist that students in upper-level and graduate classes use forms of language that track closely to their field of study and narrow their audience. As Jennifer Craig says in chapter 13, tutors may feel like strangers in an unfamiliar place when reading a paper written in a discipline different from their own—along with “some degree of being awkward, lost, vulnerable, and out of control” (217). Over time, Craig explains, tutors gain confidence as they learn about other disciplines from the papers and students they encounter. Over the years, Craig has worked with writing tutors, colleagues new to disciplinary writing, and graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). Those who tutor at MIT must respond to many proposals, reports, and presentations from science and engineering students, and a big part of her job is to help those tutors find a way into those documents (by figuring out their purpose and audience, for example). She is unflinching about the challenge these sessions can pose, but she notes that along with the challenge and uncertainty comes growth. Tutoring is hard in part because writers, as they think and talk about their work, shift rapidly between disciplinary and general knowledge, not to mention subject matter and style, words and paragraphs, and local and global concerns. As other chapters in this book show, writers increasingly move between languages, codes, and discourses. Tutors must challenge themselves to learn about other disciplines and languages as they step outside their comfort zones. Craig helps her colleagues and GTAs to do this and shares the advice she gives them with readers. She also offers three vignettes to illustrate the unavoidable complications that arise outside the comfort zone: one vignette shows a tutor who focuses on the writer’s rhetorical strategies and prioritizes writing skills over language-acquisition skills; a second vignette introduces a tutor who feels unready to approach a writer’s text and yet must contend with the writer’s resistance; a third depicts a session that teeters between convergent and divergent thinking as the writer strives to nail down the results from his data analysis while the tutor urges more reflection.

As Craig notes, tutoring L2 writers may be primarily about writing, but those writers also bring with them language issues that challenge the skills of many English monolingual tutors, most of whom would benefit from learning not only another language but also more
about
English, particularly from an applied-linguistics perspective. For example, it
takes a solid understanding of the concept of
clause
(dependent versus independent, relative versus adverbial versus noun) to explain certain uses of pronouns, conjunctions, and punctuation marks that affect the intended meaning of a text. The ability to talk about clauses is also important for explaining larger rhetorical concerns such as the arrangement of
given
and
new
information. When a monolingual tutor’s explicit knowledge of grammar lags behind that of a multilingual writer’s, the session may be less productive than it could be, and the tutor’s credibility may suffer as well. In the final chapter, chapter 14, coauthors Pimyupa W. Praphan and Guiboke Seong express their belief that tutors who work with L2 writers first need to figure out what the writers do and do not know about English, especially for the purpose of providing corrective feedback. Praphan and Seong earned their doctorates in the United States before returning to Thailand to teach English as a foreign language. Praphan also worked as an ESL tutor. They are acutely aware of the importance of
formal accuracy
and
error gravity
in learning another language, and in chapter 12 they explain why these concepts belong in the vocabulary of tutoring. Tutors will likely conclude, as Carol
Severino et al. (2013)
do, that these concepts add an important dimension to the debate over higher- and lower-order concerns.

Dewey said, “Education is not preparation for life. It is life itself.” For writing tutors everywhere, perhaps the takeaway from this book is to keep learning—about language, languages, writing, and writers. Keep striving to discover ideas and practices that improve tutoring. Use all of the resources at your disposal, and challenge yourself.

I once read an article, published in the
New Yorker
magazine, on what it means to strive for greater understanding, systematic and critical thinking, interaction with others, and personal and intellectual growth—in other words, Dewey’s notion of reflective thinking (
Gawande 2011
). It’s a true story that involves not a vibrant young tutor but an old mentor, and not a writer but a doctor. The two men came together already highly accomplished, secure, settled. Why mess with that?

Atul Gawande, the author of this piece, is a surgeon, and the highly specific set of skills he uses makes all the difference to his patients’ recovery. For a time in their careers, young and inexperienced surgeons perform worse than their older and more experienced counterparts, but over time they get better and better—up to a point. Gawande began to wonder why so many surgeons’ skills tend to plateau after reaching a certain point in their careers. Surgeons should keep getting better,
but they don’t. He noticed his own skills had reached a plateau and he decided to do something about it. He got a tutor.

He refers to his tutor as his
coach
, and he is someone who used to be Gawande’s teacher in medical school but is now retired. Gawande’s tutor followed him into the operating room, sat off to the side, and took copious notes as he observed a procedure to remove a patient’s thyroid gland. Afterward, they talked in the doctors’ lounge, and Gawande’s tutor reviewed the operation with him.

The mentor/coach/tutor reflected back to Gawande many of the things he did in a less-than-optimal way. For example, instead of draping the patient so both he and the surgical assistant could work efficiently, Gawande draped to his own advantage, which hampered the assistant. He held his elbow too high, letting wires become tangled. He used magnifying loupes that restricted his peripheral vision, and he committed a host of other mistakes that, taken together, can significantly affect the outcome of surgical procedures.

Gawande listened and took notes as his tutor broke things down for him. He is now a fan of this type of feedback and recommends it to his colleagues.

There are many lessons writing center professionals might take from this story: don’t dwell on mistakes, don’t wait until the situation is over to intervene when something is going wrong, don’t compare tutoring to a medical operation. But two things stand out for me that I believe are easy to overlook. First, the doctor came to recognize on his own that he needed help, and second, he took action to get it. To take these parts of the story for granted is tempting because sensing that you need help seems obvious, but it’s not. Most people at the top of their game (and many who are not) don’t think they need help, so when they actually do ask for it, a door opens. Dewey showed us that education is most meaningful when learning is voluntary, or what some call
self-sponsored
. Gawande is famous and well respected, and he was at least as successful as his surgeon peers. No one but he knew his skills had been leveling off. But what he experienced troubled him, creating an opening for learning that Dewey called
doubt
and we might call an
exigency
. Gawande wanted to do better, and for that he had to take a risk with a novel approach. He might have done otherwise and concluded that his sickly patients, not his skills, were the reason some of his operations fell short of the desired outcome. He could have blamed his surgical assistants, the equipment he was using, or the stress hospital administrators were inflicting on him. Instead, he risked his ego and his reputation by asking a mentor to observe and critique him so he could improve. In other
words, Gawande, in his midforties, decided to become a learner by replicating the kind of observation and feedback he experienced when he trained as a young doctor.