Tutoring Second Language Writers (3 page)

Third and fourth, reflective thinking requires interaction with others and a favorable attitude toward personal and intellectual growth. Tutoring is, by definition, collaborative, but written accents are linguistically complex and tutors need to interact with one another and the wider community of multilingual students and disciplinary experts in order to expand, personally and intellectually, their understanding of written accents.

When educators practice reflective thinking in the way Dewey intended (instead of treating reflection as merely “thinking about it”), they strive for the kinds of deeper understanding that connect the decisions and actions involved in teaching or tutoring one person with the larger effort to create a better world. They think systematically and critically about learning, they work with other educators and experts in the field, and they remain open to new ideas. When tutors practice reflective thinking, they expand the possibilities for helping students, addressing not only students’ short-term needs but also who they wish to become. Thinking reflectively in this way also helps tutors understand some of the conflicts they may feel about their work, such as the tendency to identify with students who are striving to meet their instructors’ expectations while at the same time wanting to maintain and even celebrate the students’ accents. In this case, tutors must understand that helping writers recognize and use their accents is not simply part of the writing process; it is a step toward changing our monolingual culture and helping
L2 students participate in the culture. (In the 1980s, many tutors and other academics were involved in efforts to eliminate gender bias in writing, and today the use of inclusive forms has been widely adopted, conservative outposts notwithstanding.) These aspects of working with multilingual writers—reflection, inquiry, identity, and social justice—are examined throughout the book.

In chapter 3, for example, Michelle Cox observes that some teachers penalize students for any writing that appears to lie outside the narrow boundaries of Standard Written American English. “Editing this accent out of a client’s text will, in effect, render their identity as an L2 writer invisible. And yet leaving these markers in the text may leave the student vulnerable to criticism or a lower grade. What should the tutor do in this case?” Cox’s nuanced perspective helps tutors better understand the tradeoffs involved when working with students whose writing is accented.

While chapters 2 and 3 help orient tutors around questions of identity and the writer’s purpose, chapter 4 looks into a Spanish-dominant context in which avoiding English is part of the writing center’s reality. Ambivalence toward English is the focus of this chapter, in which Shanti Bruce takes readers on a visit to the Centro de Competencias de la Comunicación (CCC) at the Universidad de Puerto Rico en Humacao (UPRH). Bruce delves into the complicated status of English teaching and learning in Puerto Rico, an island territory of the United States in the eastern Caribbean, where Bruce recognized a prime place for multilingual writing center research. Her chapter shows that language policies in places like Puerto Rico, Quebec, California, and elsewhere can be studied on location or from a distance. Recent debates on the US mainland about English-only policies and some politicians’ insistence that English be required for citizenship or legal status often fail to recognize the close relationship between language, identity, and the natural resistance people feel toward having an identity imposed on them by others, even if that identity leads to greater economic opportunity. As Bruce discusses what she heard while listening to the tutors at CCC talk about English (one tutor said, “My dad wants me to sound Merengue, and my mom wants me to be totally American like Frank Sinatra”), readers can gain a deeper understanding of the complicated nature of being a language gatekeeper. By traveling to Puerto Rico, asking questions, and listening to tutors at CCC, Bruce is able to collect important data.

Ambivalence toward English is shared by many multilingual writers, including those who live in diverse places like Miami-Dade County, located in south Florida, where almost three-fourths of all residents
speak a language other than English at home. This fact is reflected in students who visited the university writing center where Kevin Dvorak (chapter 5) and his tutors worked and to a lesser extent in the backgrounds of the tutors themselves. They spoke freely about their linguistic differences, but when it came to tutoring, these tutors tended to use English only when working with student-writers. This tendency changed when Dvorak and his tutors decided to examine the assumptions underlying this practice. Eventually they settled on two questions to investigate: When and how might code-switching be used during a tutoring session? What are students’ and tutors’ attitudes toward code-switching in the writing center? Underlying these two questions were even more basic ones: do tutors and clients prefer using both languages since that reflects the surrounding linguistic environment, or do they prefer to stick to English since that is the target language they are usually trying to learn and master?

Questions like these lead to the rich data that lives within each writing center. Many ideas can be inferred from the data tutors themselves create in the form of video recordings of their own sessions and of their responses as they watch them replayed. In chapter 6, Glenn Hutchinson and Paula Gillespie tell how they have done this kind of recording in their own center and what tutors who try it can expect. One outcome of their research for the Digital Video Project was the beginning of conversation circles, one in English for international students in the United States for their first semester who want to practice their English informally and in a low-risk environment. They also started a Spanish conversation circle so students, many of whom are children of immigrants to the Miami, Florida, area, can practice their Spanish. In other words, by examining their conferences in a systematic way, the tutors in Hutchinson and Gillespie’s center discovered a way to serve the needs of those who want to improve their L1 (because most of their schooling has been in English). Audio-only recording yields interesting data too, and it has a long history as a research tool in writing centers. For tutors who are interested, a search of dissertation abstracts using the keywords
writing center
,
tutor
, and
audio recording
yields many hits.

A better understanding of many concepts used in writing center research, like conversation analysis, semistructured interview, action research, and grounded theory is the focus of chapter 7. Rebecca Day Babcock, whose own research has won awards and grant funding, takes the reader on a tour through various stages of inquiry. Speaking directly to her readers, she explains what scholars have studied, what opportunities await future researchers, and the reasons anyone would want
to bother to undertake the investigations she proposes. Her chapter appears in the middle of the book, often the point at which readers have gathered up ideas and may be thinking about launching a research project of their own. For these readers, there is this advice from one of the tutor-researchers Babcock interviewed for her chapter.

Whether for a tutor who wants to explore new approaches to take with multilingual writers or for a writer trying out a new genre—lasting change requires experimentation and a disposition for learning that entails risk taking. As Neal
Lerner (2009
, 40–41) has shown, these qualities were present in the science and writing labs dating back to the first several decades of the 1900s. Dewey is also associated with the laboratory method of instruction (Dewey founded the first laboratory school, at the University of Chicago) and promoted “attitudes of mind” that would lead to experimentation and risk taking in learning (see also
Council of Writing Program Administrators 2011
). These remained central to Dewey’s concept of reflective thinking and his overall vision of education, even as his concept and vision were faulted by conservative critics.

Theorizing and conducting research are the lifeblood of learning. Contemplating the many possibilities for research is a good follow-up to chapter 7 and can be done independently or with other tutors. Some of the possibilities might begin with questions like these:

The chapters that make up part 3, “Words and Passages,” provide an interlude in which tutors and former tutors write about their own journeys of discovery. Though somewhat shorter than the other pieces, these chapters remind us that the path of learning is seldom safe or smooth. In chapter 8, Elizabeth (Adelay) Witherite describes how her passion for social justice led her to design an empirical study for her master’s thesis, completed in 2014, and titled
Writing Center Tutors’ Perceptions of Social Justice Issues: A Multiple Method Qualitative Study.
Witherite asked the question, “How do peer tutors experience and conceptualize social justice issues within the context of tutoring sessions in the writing center?” She collected data from eight participants through interviews, concept mapping, and social-category ranking tasks. This chapter tells the story of how she settled on her research question and managed to answer it after gathering more than eight hours of audio recordings and 145 pages of transcriptions. The distinction Witherite examined between experiencing and conceptualizing social justice issues turned out to have significant implications for understanding how words create or block opportunities for personal growth and social progress.

Philosophers are fond of describing those who try to solve intellectual problems as being caught on the “horns of a dilemma”—a conflict of truths, values, or beliefs; on the one hand versus on the other hand. Tutors experience these conflicts on a regular basis, and they can get caught between defending an instructor’s comments and empathizing with a writer’s struggle. How is a tutor to handle, say, a situation in which an instructor, who is US born and identifies as American, comes
across to the student as unfair and disrespectful, while the student, who is Ghanaian, feels shamed and defeated? In chapter 9, Jocelyn Amevuvor describes her experience of reading and later interpreting a professor’s written comment from two different perspectives, one from the teacher’s and the other from the student’s. Situations like these are difficult for tutors to sort out because one can never be 100 percent confident about the interpretation. Tutors are sometimes the only people available to help writers deal with conflicts that arise when they receive harsh or ambiguous comments. In Condon and Olson’s chapter in part 1, “Actions and Identities,” we saw that tutoring is implicated in conflicts such as this, where power, race, and discourse come together and demand that we think about what is fair and just. Here again, reflective thinking is necessary to address such conflicts. While an honest dialogue between the student and his professor is usually best, such dialogues often don’t occur. The instructor may be unavailable or the student unwilling to speak with him. In this case a tutor becomes one of the last people the writer can turn to. What is memorable about Amevuvor’s chapter is that it doesn’t pretend all tutoring sessions end happily. When tutors and writers confront hard problems, tutors seldom learn how things eventually work out for the writer. Did the student and instructor come to some sort of resolution? Was the tutor helpful? Does it matter that the tutor may never know the outcome?

What does writing look like when it balances the tension between preserving a writer’s identity and meeting an instructor’s expectations? In chapter 10, Pei-Hsun Emma Liu describes research she conducted for her doctoral dissertation and includes the writing of one of her participants, Angela, who spent many years learning to write Chinese while she was growing up in Taiwan. Liu tells us that when it came to writing in college in the United States, Angela felt writing in English made her thoughts seem simplistic, and this bothered her. She was torn between the part of her identity that placed a premium on being a good student and pleasing her teachers and another part that treasured the fullness and beauty of Chinese writing. Liu describes how, eventually, Angela came to write in a way that seemed to mitigate her conflicted feelings.