Tutoring Second Language Writers (2 page)

BEN RAFOTH

Tutoring involves multiple responsibilities. Tutors must ask the right questions and listen carefully when writers respond. They are expected to read critically, explain clearly, motivate, and empathize. As they work with writers from different backgrounds and abilities on assignments from an array of disciplines, they are also expected to know their limits and reach beyond them. Tutors are asked to do many things, but it is hard to imagine any writing center where the expectations for tutors’ responsibilities do not begin with understanding the purpose of education because understanding education’s purpose shapes the meaning and practice of tutoring.

Philosopher John Dewey believed that the purpose of education is to foster a love of learning and a desire for more education. For
Dewey (1920)
, education is an end in itself because openness to learning leads to greater social cohesion, democracy, and equality. These ideals were not idle abstractions in the first half of twentieth-century America when Dewey’s writings were taking shape against a backdrop of grinding automation, income inequality, and child labor. Dewey’s ideas were born in an American context of swelling immigration, crowded schools, and racial and ethnic tensions that were no less severe than the ones we face today. Dewey believed education was the lever that would move the United States and the world to a better place. It still holds that promise.

For tutors reading this book—from those who have little experience to those with a lot, and from undergraduate to graduate tutors—it is worth taking a moment to understand why Dewey’s vision of progressive education provides a foundation for the work of writing centers. I believe it does so for three reasons: Dewey’s vision is grounded in real-world experience, it looks toward the future, and it is embedded in a robust philosophical tradition. When learning is grounded in experience, it is driven
by curiosity and the desire to discover new things through research and inquiry. When it looks to the future, learning is ambitious and hopeful; it tries to make a positive difference. And when learning is embedded in a robust philosophy of life, like Dewey’s pragmatism, it helps us to think about teaching and writing in the context of broad philosophical perspectives that include epistemology, politics, and aesthetics.

When L2 writers striving to develop advanced literacy step into a campus writing center in the United States, they put more on the table, figuratively speaking, than drafts of their papers. They carry with them a history of their experiences with English, when and how they learned it, the values they associate it with, and the parts of their lives it displaces. They carry with them the struggles and rewards that are part of the experience of learning English. More important, they come to the table optimistic about their future and the role that education plays in it. If they seem intensely focused on their papers, it may be because they know the stakes are high. Second language writers want for themselves and the world they inhabit many of the same things almost everyone does, and they see learning to write well, in English or some variety of it, as a way up, and perhaps out. Coming as they often do from rich traditions of literacy in their homelands, they are also familiar with the aesthetic and intellectual rewards of writing and reading. They seek tutors who can help them attain whatever goals they have for writing.

Aspirations such as these find their way to writing centers because tutoring is transformative, as a number of writing center scholars have shown:
Condon (2012)
;
Fels and Wells (2011)
;
Greenfield and Rowan (2011)
;
Grimm (1999)
;
Harris (1995)
;
Kail and Trimbur (1987)
; and
Grutsch McKinney (2013)
. Each of these works has its own philosophical grounding, and it is not necessarily in Dewey’s pragmatism. As a whole, however, writing center scholarship devoted to bringing about greater justice in the world through education builds, at least in part, on Dewey’s legacy.

I have been a writing center director and tutor for twenty-five years, and it is still remarkable to me how much knowledge, skill, and understanding it takes to be a writing tutor. Compared to a lecturer who stands before a room full of students and imagines everyone in the room to be smart, eager, and appreciative, tutoring is personal. Each session is unique, and a tutor needs to think about a lot more than the talking points in a lecture. This is the case for all of the writers we work with, but it is particularly true for L2 students. More than twenty years ago, Harris and Silva (1993) observed, “We should recognize that along with
different linguistic backgrounds, ESL students have a diversity of concerns that can only be dealt with in the one-to-one setting where the focus of attention is on that particular student and his or her questions, concerns, cultural presuppositions, writing processes, language learning experiences, and conceptions of what writing English is all about” (525). Tutors must contend with learning as it unfolds in the ways Muriel Harris and Tony Silva describe, and when they falter, they must come up with something else. They also must deal with a broad range of individual differences because each student’s approach to writing and learning is different, some proceeding methodically and efficiently as they navigate their boat down the middle of the river while others push off and go wherever the current is strongest. Still others spend days on dry land before they embark, collecting supplies and pacing back and forth. Amid the various courses and disciplines, levels of study, linguistic backgrounds, types of assignments, and writing processes, tutors must work close to the ground because language is always stuck to the particulars of context. Tutors must also know that language is also a practice—a tool—and thus a means for changing contexts. Alastair Pennycook (2010), an applied linguist and author of Language as a Local Practice, sounds a lot like Dewey when Pennycook writes, “To think in terms of practices is to make social activity central, to ask how it is we do things as we do, how activities are established, regulated and changed. Practices are not just things we do, but rather bundles of activities that are the central organization of social life” (2).

Dewey’s ideas are apparent in any discussion of language and practice, which is why they remain relevant to composition theory and pedagogy (e.g.,
Crick 2003
;
Phelps 1988
) and why they have also appeared in national reports on the future of teaching (
National Commision on Teaching and America’s Future 1996
). Given the problems Dewey saw in the world at the time he wrote, in the first half of the twentieth century, it is clear his notion of reflection is the antithesis of thinking based on prejudices, impulses, unexamined beliefs, old information, discredited theories and sources, and suppressed curiosity and imagination. These ways of thinking must be isolated because they impede individual growth and social progress. One of the challenges to today’s tutors is to use reflective thinking to expand opportunities for growth for themselves and all writers they work with.

For tutors who work with multilingual writers, understanding reflective thinking is an essential requirement for the job and the title. There is a lot to know about language and how people use and experience it, especially when it comes to assisting L2 writers in the context of a writing
center. To read and learn from the chapters in this volume, as well as from the many other opportunities provided in the courses, books, journals, and collaborative projects that make up writing centers, means making a commitment to reflective thinking.

There is little doubt that tutors work diligently or that their directors aim to prepare them well, but the challenge is enormous nonetheless. The expectations for advanced literacy are high, and helping students learn to meet these expectations can be a humbling experience. For this reason, however, tutors must expand their capacities for teaching and learning by thinking in systematic and discovery-oriented ways. Those who supervise tutors and direct writing centers are also implicated in this call to expand their capacities for thinking (see
Bushman 1999
;
Farrell 2007
).
Teaching Second-Language Writers
provides a step in this direction, and in the remaining pages of this chapter, I hope to elaborate on reflective thinking and how it relates to tutoring and the various chapters in this collection as I see them.

Tutors have probably heard the term
reflection
used to refer to many different things. We are now to a point at which being asked to reflect on something means we are asked to
think about it
—in other words, reflecting, musing, pondering and thinking—they all sound the same. Teachers sometimes implore students
to really reflect on
an idea, which may mean they want students to do more than merely think about it. But what is that, exactly?

In
How We Think
,
Dewey (1933)
tried to distinguish between reflection and conventional thinking when he defined reflection as the “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions toward which it tends [that] includes a conscious and voluntary effort to establish belief upon a firm basis of evidence and rationality” (9). Carol
Rodgers (2002
, 845) points out that Dewey’s notion of reflection involves these qualities:

The first of these, connecting experiences and ideas to achieve greater understanding and social progress, begins with tutors connecting with the writers they serve. Ilona Leki made this point when she wrote,

The chapters that appear in this book speak to matters of language, locality, and practice. When they are read and shared in the context of a larger program of tutor training and education, these chapters provide new information, theories, and practices essential to the four qualities of reflective thinking listed above.

Take, for example, the question of tutor education and what tutors need to know in order to work collaboratively in a writing center. Chapter 2 connects the work tutors perform with L2 writers to higher education’s larger responsibilities for promoting tolerance and justice. It is sometimes easy to forget that education is about the future and the kind of world we want for ourselves and the generations that will follow. However, if tutors and teachers of literacy look forward to a time when the way people speak and write is not held against them, then there must be ways for all educators, tutors included, to help make this future. Frankie Condon and Bobbi Olson write, “We believe that by giving space for tutors to engage in a deeper and more theoretical understanding of their work—particularly their work with multi- and translingual writers—writing centers can be a locus of participatory agency for change. We can help our institutions to transform the conditions in which Othered students write and learn.” The coauthors describe how they helped transform conditions as the tutors in their writing center conducted research, discussed, wrote, and produced a book for future generations of tutors at their university. Drawing inspiration from the praxis-based theories of Paulo Freire, they enacted a type of reflection more political than Dewey’s but equally committed to the power of teaching, learning, and knowledge making for bringing about change and justice.

Or take a question that often arises in tutoring sessions with L2 writers: what do we do when a second language writer asks for help with a draft that contains many instances of her written accent?

One quality of reflection asks tutors to think of a tutoring session as one step along a path toward greater understanding and social progress. In other words, the question of how to handle written accents
requires a level of understanding that goes deeper than the knowledge required to fix or proofread a paper. It requires knowledge of the writer and his goals and of the relationship between a person’s accent and his or her identity. A second quality of reflection requires systematic, disciplined, and critical thinking about the writer and his writing. For example, what are the features that manifest as accented writing, and how are they different from those considered to be unaccented writing? What is the writer’s field of study and what does the instructor expect in this piece of writing? What does the student want to achieve with his writing and how does this goal relate to preserving or losing the written accent? Questions like these speak to the need for tutors to be inquisitive and to pursue their curiosity by creating new knowledge. The chapters in this book address various ways to do that: developing and testing theories, conducting observations, examining practices, writing narratives, making interpretations, counting, and qualifying. They also illustrate different types and uses of evidence to support claims, and they show how intimately connected the links are between research, practices, and persons.