Tutoring Second Language Writers (8 page)

We offer these questions for the purposes of exploration rather than as if they could or should be answered definitively. We hope they will generate dialogue in your writing center as they have been generative in the writing center at UNL.

Canagarajah
,
A. Suresh
.
2013
.
Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations
.
London
:
Routledge
.

Suresh Canagarajah’s book provides an overview of practices writing center tutors can adopt to support multilingual writers. In particular, the methods outlined by Canagarajah will help tutors help writers to produce texts that do not merely conform to SWAE but that also draw creatively and critically upon the multiple discourses and language varieties of the writers.

Conference on College Composition and Communication
.
1974
.
Students’ Right to Their Own Language
. National Council of Teachers of English.
http://www.ncte.org/library /NCTEFiles/Groups/CCCC/NewSRTOL.pdf
.

First adopted by CCCCs in 1974, this resolution affirms students’ right to speak and write in their mother tongues and home dialects. Although controversial when it was first endorsed, the resolution was, in fact, prescient; SRTOL accurately forecasts findings reported in the most current and cutting-edge scholarship on linguistic difference.

Horner
,
Bruce
,
Min-Zhan
Lu
,
Jacqueline Jones
Royster
, and
John
Trimbur
.
2011
. “
Opinion: Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach
.”
College English
73
(
2
):
303
–
21
.
https://louisville.edu/faculty/bmhorn01/Translingual Statement.pdf
.

This essay serves as a foundational piece to help tutors (re)consider teaching practices within the writing center; a “translingual” teaching approach, according to Horner et al., “sees difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading, and listening” (303).

Norton
,
Bonny
.
2000
.
Identity and Language Learning: Gender, Ethnicity and Educational Change
.
Harlow, UK
:
Pearson Longman
.

Bonny Norton’s book examines the impacts of second language learning on identity. In particular, Norton addresses relations of power between multilingual
language learners and realizes the extent to which the teaching of language is never neutral and is always embedded in relationships among language, power, and identity.

Young
,
Vershawn Ashanti
, and
Aja
Martinez
, eds.
2001
.
Code Meshing as World English: Pedagogy, Policy, Performance
.
Urbana, IL
:
National Council of Teachers of English
.

This edited collection includes essays tutors may find helpful for understanding how teaching practices might be changed to acknowledge the legitimacy and value of texts composed in World Englishes as well as the theoretical grounding for those changes to pedagogical approaches.

Bizzell
,
Patricia
.
2002
. “
The Intellectual Work of ‘Mixed’ Forms of Academic Discourses
.” In
ALT DIS: Alternating Discourses and the Academy
, edited by
Christopher
Schroeder
,
Helen
Fox
, and
Patricia
Bizzell
,
1
–
10
.
Portsmouth, NH
:
Boynton/Cook
.

Bonilla-Silva
,
Eduardo
.
2006
.
Racism without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States
.
2nd ed.
Lanham, MD
:
Rowman and Littlefield
.

Boquet
,
Elizabeth H.
2002
.
Noise from the Writing Center
.
Logan
:
Utah State University Press
.

Condon
,
Frankie
.
2012
.
I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric
.
Logan
:
Utah State University Press
.

Dees
,
Sarah
,
Beth
Godbee
, and
Moira
Ozias
.
2007
. “
Navigating Conversational Turns: Grounding Difficult Discussions on Racism
.”
Praxis Writing Center Journal
5
(
1
).

Denny
,
Harry C.
2010
.
Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-To-One Mentoring
.
Logan
:
Utah State University Press
.

Dinitz
,
Sue
, and
Jean
Kiedaisch
.
2003
. “
Creating Theory: Moving Tutors to the Center
.”
Writing Center Journal
23
(
2
):
63
–
76
.

Freire
,
Paulo
.
1993
.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
.
New York
:
Continuum
.

Geller
,
Anne Ellen
.
2005
. “
Tick-Tock, Next: Finding Epochal Time in the Writing Center
.”
Writing Center Journal
25
(
1
):
15
–
24
.

Greenfield
,
Laura
.
2011
. “
The ‘Standard English’ Fairytale: A Rhetorical Analysis of Racist Pedagogies and Commonplace Assumptions about Language Diversity.
” In
Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change
, edited by
Laura
Greenfield
and
Karen
Rowan
,
33
–
60
.
Logan
:
Utah State University Press
.

Grill
,
Jennifer
.
2010
. “
Whose English Counts? Native Speakers as English Language Learners
.”
TESOL Journal
1
(
3
):
358
–
67
.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5054/tj.2010.226823
.

Nakamaru
,
Sarah
.
2010
. “
Theory In/To Practice: A Tale of Two Multilingual Writers: A Case-Study Approach to Tutor Education
.”
Writing Center Journal
30
(
2
):
100
–
23
.

Severino
,
Carol
.
2006
. “
The Sociopolitical Implications of Response to Second-Language and Second-Dialect Writing
.” In
Second-Language Writing in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook
, edited by
Paul Kei
Matsuda
,
Michelle
Cox
,
Jay
Jordan
, and
Christina
Ortmeier-Hooper
,
333
–
50
.
Boston
:
Bedford/St. Martin’s
.

Turner
,
Carolyn
.
1994
. “
Guests in Someone Else’s House: Students of Color
.”
Review of Higher Education
17
(
4
):
355
–
70
.

Villanueva
,
Victor
.
1993
.
Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color
.
Urbana, IL
:
National Council of Teachers of English
.

Wiley
,
Terrance G.
, and
Marguerite
Lukes
.
1996
. “
English-Only and Standard English Ideologies in the U.S.
”
TESOL Quarterly
30
(
3
):
511
–
35
.

Young
,
Vershawn Ashanti
.
2010
. “
Should Writer’s Use They Own English?
”
Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies
12
:
110
–
117
.

ESL students are graduate students and undergraduates; forty-five years old and eighteen years old; highly educated doctors, lawyers, and teachers in their home countries and naïve, inexperienced teenagers; newly arrived immigrants, graduates of U.S. high schools; poor writers in English but good writers in their L1, or illiterate in their L1; those hoping to remain in the United States, those eager to get back home; those extremely critical of life in the United States or U.S. foreign policy and those wholly in support of anything the Unites States does. They are also diverse in their expectations of life in the United States, their financial situations, their willingness to integrate into a new society. (39)

In order to talk about L2 students, we must use terms to discuss them, terms that distinguish them from English L1 students (while keeping in mind that the terms only refer to linguistic identity and therefore are necessarily reductionist). One of the most fraught areas for scholars of second language writing is in deciding which of the many available terms to use when writing about these students. In the writing center, too, you’ll need to decide what terms to use to talk about L2 students during discussions among writing center staff. Further, if you decide to read more scholarship on L2 writers, you’ll need to know that certain terms when used in search databases will call up articles only from a certain era.

You may have noticed that in the above introduction and throughout this chapter, I use the term
L2
(a choice I discuss further below). The above quotes from
Leki (1992)
include the terms
ESL
and
native speaker
. The other chapters in this collection may use still other terms:
multilingual writer
,
English-language learner
,
English as an additional language
. Some terms that refer to linguistic identity were developed to refer to particular groups of L2 students, and others came into use to avoid negative connotations that became associated with older terms. Terms used to identify students who use English as an L2 have implications for how the students are perceived (or, how the student perceives the user of the term) but also provide information useful for tutoring. In this section, I review these terms, discussing each term’s history and connotations, and then I discuss how knowing more about a student’s linguistic history can impact the work of writing centers.

International students
:
This term refers to students who come to the United States on a student visa for the purpose of studying in a US college or university. Some of these students are here for a short term, such as a semester or a year. Others are here for entire degree programs. The term
international student
is an appropriate term when referring to visa status but an inappropriate term when referring to linguistic identity, as not all international students use English as a second language. Some of these students come
from countries where English is one of the primary languages (such as India), and some of the students from countries where English is not a primary language will have studied abroad or at educational institutions where English is the language of instruction. And not all college students who use English as an L2 are on a student visa. Until the late nineties, the overriding perception of college L2 students was that they were all international students, an identity construction that led to mistaken assumptions about students’ knowledge of US culture, experiences with learning writing, and understanding of US academic conventions. In fact, most of the scholarship written on L2 students until the late nineties focused exclusively on international L2 students.

Permanent-resident L2 student
:
Particularly useful for tutors to know, this term distinguishes between international L2 students and L2 students who live in the United States as residents. This term includes students who were born in the United States and live in a home where a language other than English is used, students who immigrated to the United States during their childhood or adolescence and went to school in the United States, and nontraditionally aged college students who immigrated to the United States as adults (Dana Ferris distinguishes among these groups by referring to those who were born in the United States or immigrated before age eight as “early-arriving resident students” and those who arrived in the United States after age eight as “late-arriving resident students”) (see
Ferris 2009
). This group also includes transnational students (
Roberge 2002
), students who split their time between the United States and their family’s heritage country. These students may spend summers in their family’s heritage country or even do part of their schooling in this country. Since the late 1990s, research on resident students has focused on generation 1.5 college students, students still in the process of acquiring English who graduated from US high schools (see
Harklau, Losey, and Siegal 1999
). This research has uncovered important differences in the ways in which international students and resident L2 students have learned English, their attitudes towards English, and their literacy histories—all important factors in writing development and identity. For instance, Joy
Reid (2006)
has described international students as “eye learners,” as these students have learned English primarily through their eyes—through reading textbooks, doing grammar exercises, and translating texts. In contrast, she describes resident L2 students as “ear” learners, as they have learned English primarily through their ears by listening to spoken English and US media and by interacting with peers. Due to these differences in how English is learned, international L2 students often write with a more formal academic style, while permanent-resident L2 students often write
with a looser style more akin to spoken English. A tutor may have difficulty identifying a resident L2 student as L2 at first. Often, these students wear Western-style clothing, are adept at idiomatic English, and are familiar with US pop culture and history. Their strengths in speaking English may mask their linguistic history and cause tutors (and faculty) to be surprised when they read resident L2 students’ writing, which often contains L2 markers as well as idiomatic English.

English as a second language (ESL)
:
This term refers to any student who uses English as a second (third, fourth, etc.) language. This is the term with the longest history on this list. Because of this longevity, it is the term that is the most recognizable but that also comes with the most baggage. This term has been challenged for several reasons. First, numbering the languages a writer uses can be problematic, as some writers will use more than one “first language,” and even for those who have one first language, the writer may have learned English not second, but third, fourth, and so forth. To address this possibility, the term
English as an additional language
emerged but, perhaps due the acronym. but never really caught on in the US, though it is widely used in Canada, the UK, and Australia. Second, the term can be seen as putting undue emphasis on English, implying that this language has more status than the student’s other languages. Third, the term
ESL
implies that English is not used as a primary language, when, in fact, English becomes the primary language for many L2 writers for use in certain domains. Indeed, for many resident L2 students, English becomes the primary language for civic, business, and academic purposes. For many international L2 scholars, English becomes their only language for academic reading and writing. This term has also come to be associated with English-language support programs at US secondary schools. Because many resident L2 students in college have exited ESL programs during secondary school (or earlier), they often no longer want to be identified with this term. As research by Christina
Ortmeier-Hooper (2008)
and others has shown, they often see themselves as no longer ESL. However, international students typically do not have negative associations with this term and have often been told to use the term
ESL
when searching for language support at US colleges and universities. Until a tutor knows whether the student is an international or resident L2 writer, they should refrain from using this term.

Second language (L2)
:
This term was first used to broaden what was then ESL writing studies to include research in other linguistic contexts in which a language other than English is used as the L2 (3, 4, etc.). This term is also used to demarcate the field dedicated to studying writing in
an L2, second language writing studies (SLW). Because I do research in this area, I often use the term
L2
in order to associate my work with this field of study. You may have also noticed that
L2
is the term of choice in this collection, as the editors asked contributors to use this term for the sake of consistency. A benefit of this term is that it doesn’t carry the same baggage as the term
ESL
. In my experience as a teacher of L2 sections of first-year composition, I have found that resident L2 students tend not to take issue with the term
L2
as they seem not to associate it with
ESL
. However,
L2
retains some of the same problems associated with the term
ESL
: it asserts that English is the second language learned by the writer, implies that English has more status than other languages, and implies that English is not one of the writer’s primary languages. Another problem with this term is that it is less precise than the term
ESL
. For instance, my research and teaching are entirely focused on students who use English as a second language, not students who use French or Spanish or another language as a second language. And yet I call myself an L2 writing specialist when, technically, I am an ESL writing specialist.

Native English speaker/nonnative English speaker (NES/NNES)
:
These terms are used to avoid the problems associated with numbering languages. The term
native speaker
refers to a speaker who learned English as their first language and, implicitly, to an English user who was born in what Braj
Kachru (1985)
has called an “inner circle” country in his delineation of World Englishes: the United States, Anglophone Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. Nonnative speakers include speakers of English who learned English as an additional language (and were not born in one of Kachru’s inner-circle countries). These terms have fallen out of favor, largely due to Kachru’s work on World Englishes. Kachru also identified two other circles: the outer circle (countries where English has a historical or governmental role, including such countries as India, Malaysia, and Pakistan) and the expanding circle (countries where English is gaining prominence but does not have a historical or governmental role, including such countries as China, South Korea, and much of Europe). So, a person from the outer circle may use English as one of their first languages, but, according to this term, would not be seen as a native speaker. In other words, the term
NES
is used to describe a person born in a Western country (i.e., the UK), but not in a country where English was brought in through colonization (i.e., India) or through language contact (i.e., China). However, you will still see these terms used in the literature, particularly
NES
, largely because there are few terms available to refer to students who use English as a first language (the only terms I know of are
English L1
, which is often shortened to
L1
, and
English monolingual
, a term that makes assumptions about the students’ proficiencies with languages other than English).
NES
and
NNES
are terms often used by international students during tutoring sessions, though, who will ask tutors to tell them how a native speaker of English would express a certain idea.

Limited English proficient (LEP)/English-language learner (ELL)
:
If you are an education major or minor, you have probably encountered these terms, as they are the terms currently used by the US Department of Education to categorize L2 students. Based on language proficiency assessment, L2 students are labeled either
LEP
or
ELL
. Students can move from
LEP
to
ELL
(by improving scores on proficiency exams), but once labeled
ELL
, the label sticks throughout their K–12 education, becoming an identity that continues to follow the students even when they no longer need English-language support. This label can be a problem for students who no longer want to be identified as such but also a problem for educators who want to best serve these students. A student who reaches ELL proficiency in elementary school has a different literacy profile than one who reaches ELL proficiency in the sophomore year of high school, and yet when they enter senior English class, they both bear the same label. It is unlikely that student writers will use these terms to identify themselves, but they are still good terms to know, as they come up in the literature on L2 writing, particularly scholarship based in K–12 contexts. Also, faculty sometimes use these terms to avoid the more problematic terms available.

Multilingual learner (MLL)
:
This is a term that has gained favor lately; it avoids some of the problems associated with other terms on this list, as it does not number languages and seems to come with only positive connotations. One issue with this term, though, is its vagueness. It refers to anyone who uses multiple languages, so it also includes students who use English as an L1 and study other languages. It is, in other words, an umbrella term, one that could potentially be used to refer to all students at a college or university if the institution has a foreign-language requirement. However, in some of the literature, scholars use the term
multilingual
to only refer to L2 students. This term is a safe one to use with both international and resident L2 students, as it won’t offend either group, but it may be unfamiliar to them. For instance, if this term is used on a writing center website, international students looking for language support may not see it as applying to them and therefore may not identify the writing center as a place that offers them support.

The truth is that all of these terms, while important vocabulary for tutors to be familiar with, can come to have negative connotations. Suresh
Canagarajah (2002)
has written about the “difference-as-deficit” perspective of L2 writers, a perspective that focuses on what L2 writers cannot yet do with English and does not recognize these students’ strengths with language and literacy across multiple languages, including English. Indeed, students who enter the writing center and immediately proclaim themselves ESL, as if this one designation explains all of their challenges with writing, may have internalized this deficit perspective.