When Times Get Though

In my most recent tutoring experience, I suddenly became aware of not only how important it is to tailor your lessons to each student, but also to deal with the difficult students we don’t expect. As I was tutoring this international student, I recognized some of the typical characteristics we have studied in the session. Her paper lacked clear transitions and rarely possessed sentences that were analytical or connected her thoughts together. She was also reserved and was clearly embarrassed or less than pleased at having to ask for help. However, instead of being offended by her curt way of speaking or her serious demeanor, I was prepared for all these problems and was aware that her writing style and way of being were a reflection of both cultural differences and miscommunication. However, what I was not expecting was her unwillingness to work with me and her desire to have me do a lot of the work for her. As I worked with her, it slowly became clear that she had expected that I would not just provide advice, but would provide answers as well. At one point, when I was explaining to her that she needed to add more quotes and analysis, she said to me “I’m an international student, I don’t know how to do that.” Because the student was an ESL speaker, she not only didn’t have lots of confidence in her ability to write, but also thought that it was an excuse to allow me to do it for her. Although I was surprised, I continued with the session as best I could. I think that we often discuss the challenges we face as writing consultants with grammar, writing and commentary, but think it might also help us to keep the conversation going about how to deal with students when times get tough.

Pondering on Progress: What I have learned this semester

When I think about what I have learned this semester, it is almost hard to believe how different my approach has become. I have been working as a tutor for a long time, both with international students and English speaking students. Although I would like to still think I was helpful before, the way in which I handle a situation has become revolutionized. When I first started tutoring, I thought mostly about the way in which I would handle the situation if it was my paper that I was writing, whether that would be how I would formulate a thesis statement or how I would structure my own paper. Then I would try to get a student to model his or her paper in this way. Although I think that modeling can be a very effective method when working as a writing consultant, the problem with my approach was that it meant I was not focusing on each student’s individual needs and working with their style. Now, when I first sit down to work with a student, I first try to assess what the student’s top priorities should be, then also figure out what they want to work on and what they feel are the overall weaknesses they feel they need to improve on. Then when I am reading their paper with them and I come across a rough patch, I try to make it a dialogue about improvement, not just me dictating to them what they should be doing. Not only does this help prevent my point of view from influencing their paper too much, but it also helps to engage them more and make the session a constant conversation about writing their work, and what they want to express. Another large difference to my approach now is that I feel I have learned how to make the session that much more effective by preparing myself appropriately. It is interesting how much of a difference it really makes when you have read the student’s paper ahead of time and focused your thoughts by writing commentary. Knowing exactly what you need to address in the session not only makes you look more professional as a consultant, but also gives you the ability to prioritize. When I don’t do this, I find that I end up giving each student much more sentence level focused suggestions or broad general tips rather than addressing the most important concerns of the paper. I think there is also a certain pressure that each student feels when they are conducting a session. I know that I personally feel nervous in a consultation and am so concerned about wasting a student’s time that I am distracted when trying to reread their paper at the beginning. This way I am completely organized ahead of time so that no matter how nervous I get, I always have my commentary to help me refocus.

Even though I spend much of my time tutoring international students, I think it is in this area that I have seen the greatest change in my approach. Working with international students is always a challenge because it is necessary to have a separate approach altogether. Learning about the different facets of this approach has helped me to specialize my approach even more. I think the information that I have learned that has made the largest impact is becoming aware of not only the differences between ESL students and native speakers but of differences among ESL students from various areas. I think that more than anything, being aware of this has helped me to completely tailor my sessions to fit the needs of each individual student.

ESL with Arabic and Japanese Students

In a sports game, you only have so much time on the clock, your actions directly affect the people you are working with and overall, what you want is to succeed. Therefore, knowing what the weak spot is of the person charging towards you gives you an unparalleled advantage that can allow you to succeed and succeed well. Similarly, as the article, “Influence of cultural and linguistic background on the writing of Arabic and Japanese students of English” by Bouchra Moujtahid explores, having previous knowledge of the ESL student’s anticipated weakness before a consultation can allow you to have the most effective session possible. Moujtahid narrows in on the examples of both Arabic and Japanese students to highlight the ways in which the lessons, rules and guidelines of one’s native language and culture directly affect the ways in which he or she write.

Having worked directly with several Japanese and Arabic students, I have found that Moujtahid’s experiences are not only similar to my own, but that his conclusions posses crucial information that could have been pivotal to my sessions. I think for any consultant, acknowledging that the student being helped is not stupid, lazy or wrong, but is just following different rules, allows the consultant and the tutor to work more cohesively together. Moujtahid emphasizes this saying, “the difference between their native language and the language they are trying to learn are the cause for most errors.” Understanding this then allows the tutor to not only address the problem as it pertains to the paper, but the root of it as well. As a result, “knowing certain mistakes a student is more likely if they come from a particular country can help make you more aware.” It is only after an interaction such as this that a student can learn to fix these mistakes on his or her own in the future. I think it can often be lost during consultations that the sessions themselves are not just for one paper, but serve as learning environment as well, teaching students how to be stronger writers across the board.

A few weeks ago, I was helping a man from Egypt studying English who was clearly struggling with many of the same issues Moutahid details in his article. He had a tendency to smile, nod and remain positive even when he did understand a particular lesson. As a result, we would move forward only to realize he wasn’t soaking in what we were doing. Within his writing, he liked to repeat himself over and over, even if the claim he was making in one sentence had previously been made and was by no means furthering his argument. The article addresses this very issue saying, “Arabs tend towards exaggeration, emotionalism, overstatement and what is sometimes called “‘purple prose.’” Understanding that this is the case makes it much easier to not only be prepared for such repetition, but to explain to a student how it becomes distracting to a western reader. At the time, I was a little lost as to what to do. He was clearly nervous and I didn’t want to further embarrass him by suggesting lots of changes and left the session unsure of how useful I had been. Thinking back, I think if I understood Moujtahid’s idea that, ““In Arabic writing “there is a greater emphasis upon the form of the expression than upon the content which is being expressed,”’ I would have known to specifically address issues concerning structure in western writing that could have helped to reduce his repetition.

Recently, I have also worked with a Japanese student who I have previously mentioned in my blog. Reading this article’s commentary that Japanese feel that other forms of communication are “more sincere than language” and therefore, find it necessary to convey their meaning in another way, was very interesting. I very much found this to be the case, as there were times when quotes were placed randomly without analysis, explanations, transitions and ties were left out and the student looked at me as if I was slightly stupid when I explained that I didn’t understand certain connections.

With this said though, he states at the end of the article, “These differences between Arabs and Japanese are exactly what students of the two cultures would predict.” Despite my agreeing with him, I have considered whether or not we should also be aware of the assumptions we are making. Although I completely agree that anticipating common errors can help both the student and the tutor be more successful, I think it is still important to take each session with a case to case approach.

After reflecting on this article, I do also begin to wonder whether or not writing style is not only the direct product of not only what is typical in a particular area, but also encapsulates or represents a culture’s ideologies.

ESL is not as easy as ABC

“Do you understand what I mean when I say…” is a common phrase I use when tutoring ESL students. Although, often, the problems my students have arise from having been taught a different grammatical principle or not understanding how to organize a paper, it became clear to me during a recent tutoring session with an ESL student that some of the problems students face come from a more fundamental problem. As a result of this, not only can it make your session more difficult as you struggle to find the right approach, but can cause the student to become frustrated or to tune you out.

During my most recent session, a student with whom I had met a few times before to discuss more informal assignments came to see me with his paper. Although this student is more advanced in terms of his language skills than many of the students I have seen, I was amazed to find that he had absolutely no idea how to write an analytical paper. His assignment was to talk about one book with another book’s perspective in mind for his FYS class. In its essence, his assignment was the typical, "compare and contrast" the arguments of two different books style essay. With that said however, his paper lacked a thesis, a real argument and left me more confused about the topics of the two books than when I started. What was most interesting about this experience was that his mistakes were very different than any I had encountered before. This hit me immediately as I began to read his introduction paragraph, as I was surprised to find that it gave no indication of the argument of the paper, but was merely a summary of one of the books. Leigh Ryan and Lisa Zimmerelli speak to this type of problem in chapter five of their book, The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors, when they say, “Other cultures approach a problem by giving a detailed history first, information that other writers might find unnecessary.” Although caught off guard, I did my best not to discourage the student, but to work with him to help him understand the importance of an introduction paragraph to the paper and to explain to him that although it is ok to have a little bit of summary, there are also many other things that need to be included.

Another example of why this paper was unusual compared to the style of western writing I am used to was that, throughout his paper, he would interject questions in italics as if to provoke a certain thought from his audience. However, the problem with this was that the very questions he was proposing were the same ones he needed to be answering himself through his argument. Leigh Ryan and Lisa Zimmerelli explain that, the purpose of writing can be different for an ESL student, as they were often taught that writing had a different meaning or was supposed to bring forth a different type of reaction than what the western style of writing teaches. With this student’s paper, it seemed like it stemmed towards the “exaggeration and emotionalism” that Ryan and Zimmerelli mention as being typical. I discovered that the student was less trying to argue a particular point or claim than he was trying to retell certain details of the story in a more beautiful way, while forcing the reader to make the conclusions on their own. This is very similar to many of the concepts we discussed last class having to do with cultural backgrounds influencing a student’s style of writing. I think it is important to be aware of a student’s academic past to understand where their weaknesses might be in order to best help them improve.

With this said however, I was still very unsure of how to proceed, not wanting to offend the student, but also knowing that this was an unacceptable standard of organization and argumentation for almost all professors. I therefore, took Ryan and Zimmerelli’s advice that “culture determines acceptable ways of presenting information and in a tutoring session, acknowledging cultural differences often means explaining appropriate rhetorical patters for standard academic English.” Once I realized that the student was unaware of the mistakes he was making, we worked together to recreate the outline of his paper. Using ideas he already had written down, but not flushed out, and put them in a new order on a separate sheet of paper. In order to be able to do this, I definitely had to employ a more dialectic approach, constantly asking him questions and making conclusions based on what he had written and how he answered to then ask my next question. This way, despite the peculiarities of the paper, I was able to “respond first to the content and organization of their paper, as you would with any writer,” like Ryan and Zimmerelli suggest. This way, together we were able to manipulate his old paper into a new structure while preserving all his own ideas, just putting them in an order that made them into an argument, not just a bunch of statements.

Although that hurdle had been jumped, I soon discovered that we had another issue to deal with: he had some issues with fundamental aspects of an analytical paper. It turned out that the approach the student had been taught was very different from the western style we are used to. When he was making a claim about one of the books, he had summarized the events that had occurred in a few pages to use as support for the point he wished to make. Not only was there very little introduction or analysis of the events he paraphrased, but it also became apparent to me that he had not used a single quotation. When I asked him why he had chosen that method, I uncovered that he did not know how to use quotations for evidence in a paper or to sum up an even when he was writing about a piece of fiction. Ryan and Zimmerelli mention this type of situation when they say, “many problems that second language writers encounter occur because their first language follows different rules.” Slowly I was able to work with him to explain the different way he could use quotations and the importance of them.

Through this session, it became clear to me that we, as writing consultants, must not only prepare ourselves for tutoring ESL students differently than other students, but that we also must treat every situation and student in a case by case fashion.

She helps me, She helps me not

As a student, the question, “whom do we write for?” becomes a very difficult one to answer. Although in theory, I would like to think I write for myself, to push myself to really explore new ideas and present my ideas in an interesting way, the reality is that most of the times I, like most students, adapt my writing to suit the needs, preferences and requirements of my teachers. Although part of me wonders if this is how it should really be, I have come to accept it as part of our learning system. With that said, however, the question of whom are we serving as Writing Consultants, also seems to come into question a times as the article, “In Defense of Conference Summaries: Widening the Reach of Writing Center Work” by Jane Cogie suggests.

In my mind, the purpose of the writing center is to best serve the student by providing a safe space where they can receive judgment free assistance with their writing. Although teachers may argue otherwise, most students feel that in order to go talk to their professors about a particular draft, their paper must be in a state where it could potentially be turned in if need be. This means that students must be able to write their papers many days in advance and already be confident in their ideas and arguments. Overall, students tend to respect their professors enough that they are afraid of embarrassing themselves by presenting a draft that has any known weakness. Therefore, the student who is unsure of what they are doing, embarrassed about struggling or who has just written the paper a few days before it is due, feels that they cannot go to their teachers for help with their writing ahead of time. The honest truth is that the majority of us are that type of student. As a result, I think it is important that the writing center be an outlet for students who which to improve their writing without any harsh criticism, judgment or even pressure, where they can actually improve their papers before they present them to their teachers. With that said however, the concept of “Teacher Response” sheets makes me question whether or not we are in fact always serving the student. In her article, Cogie explains, “Comments by two of the study's respondents indeed reflect the stereotype of writing center tutor as subservient to the teacher. One of these instructors stated that the most useful aspect of the summaries was that they allowed her ‘to evaluate if I felt the best use of the tutor's time was being made.’” The professor that Cogie highlights seems to not only feel that the tutor is serving her needs specifically, but that she personally has the full right to evaluate the effectiveness and the purpose of the tutor. Cogie then takes this one step further, highlighting how another professor states, “"it was very helpful to know that my specific suggestions for improvement were being addressed."” This other professor pushes the relationship between him or herself and the tutor so far as to almost state that the role of the tutor is to reinforce the teacher’s own particular views of writing and that the position of the tutor is such that they should just be reminding the student to actually do what the teacher has told them. Although theoretically, these teachers want the same thing that the tutors’ want, to help the student improve their writing, it seems that the presence of this type of relationship between tutor and teacher could potentially change the student’s reaction to the writing center. As a student, if I felt that by going to my writing center, I would only gain a better understanding of the changes my teacher wished me to make, not improve overall as a writer, than writing to me would become merely a game. As a result, a writing center would no longer represent a place where I could participate in a process through which I could constantly work to express my ideas and myself.

The Fear of A Writing Consultant

Roosevelt may have said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” but as I sat down with one of my ESL students who was on the edge of failing the one last class she needed to graduate, my own inability to help her successfully became what I feared the most. This particular student had specifically come to work with me from the School of Continuing studies. A mother of two with a law degree from her home country, she was clearly smart, educated and persistent, returning to get her undergraduate degree in America even though she had not been to school in twenty years. With that said however, her English analytical writing was very much at a middle school level. When she came to meet with me two nights before her paper was due, panic flooded through me as I realized that her paper was all over the place and would by no means get her the type of grade she needed to pass the English course that she had taken and failed the previous semester.

It was at this moment that I realized that what I feared most as a consultant was not encountering an abrasive student or being unprepared for a session, but letting down a student who clearly needed my help. This particular student, however, almost seemed to be unable to be helped because of her desire to “just be done with the paper.” Although I knew what she wanted was for me just to make some line edits, give her a few suggestions about her conclusion and send her on her way, I couldn’t do that. As a result, I was not only left with the task of somehow figuring out how to salvage this paper without making her re-write the entire thing and balance her growing anxiety and frustration as the list of my suggestions grew too.

Although I recognize that as consultants, we have to remove ourselves personally from the situation and not feel completely responsible for the success or progress of the student or use it to measure our effectiveness as a tutor, it is much easier that say than to do it. As the student with whom I had worked with many times before sat before me, I felt responsible for helping her get back on track because I had the knowledge and the realization that she didn’t have, that if she did not, she would fail. As a result, I was more afraid for her than she was for herself. Steve Sherwood speaks to this idea in his article “Apprenticed to Failure: Learning from the Students We Can’t Help” when he states, “We feel anguish when we fail to help students because we invest ourselves in and care deeply about our work. If the opposite were true, if we did not care and did not strive for excellence, we would find neither safety nor satisfaction.” It is therefore, the result of this very situation that I felt afraid to fail because I felt afraid of the very same “anguish” Sherwood describes.

In the end, I followed the age old principal, “Do your best and that’s all you can do.” Often as a writing consultant, I feel that if I don’t correct an obvious grammatical error or tell them to fix a particular topic sentence, it is my fault if they get marked off for that in the end. However, eventually, as I did with that particular student, I took a step back and remembered that it was not my paper and in the end it was she that needed to take responsibility for the content and quality of the paper overall. Although this didn’t get rid of my fears or even some of my guilt at knowing I may have not been able to help her enough, it helped me to relax enough so that I didn’t get discouraged in future sessions to come.

Don't Stop Believing: The Impact of Works Regarding Working as as Writing Tutor on a Consultation

As a result of my peer consultation with Carter Staub, not only did I became more aware of not only my own practices as a writing fellow, but also was able to better understand the role a tutor can have by placing myself in the writer’s seat. It was through this experience that I was, for the first time, able to practice the ideologies of the different texts we have studied. As a result, I have found that their particular practices were both applicable and influential to both how I conducted my writing appointment and my experience as a writer.

When talked about theoretically, much of the advice given by the readings we have discussed seem obvious, but when put into place, I found that their particular and specific guidance allowed me to both understand what the student I was helping was attempting to do. As well, having their suggestions as a reservoir of knowledge from which to draw from, possessing the insight given by these texts gave me a certain level of confidence as a tutor because I was mentally prepared and educated enough to provide practical and functional solutions. 

When I actually sat down and met with Carter, I felt prepared for my tutoring consultation because of the work I did ahead of time on the hard copy of her draft provided for me. Before this class, my natural instinct when correcting a draft was to cover its margins with little notes throughout the work. This is what most students are taught to do when reading any primary source text for class, or when checking over their own papers and therefore, it is natural to have a tendency towards this style of editing. However, as our readings discuss, the overwhelming nature of this style eventually detracts from the consultant’s meaning, leaving a student so defeated that they could become reluctant to making any changes at all. In Richard Straub’s, The Concept of Control in Teacher Response: Defining the Varieties of "Directive" and "Facilitative" Commentary, he expands upon this point further. His advice culminates in his asking of the questions, “How do different kinds of response create different images of the responder and establish various relationships with the student? What kinds of comments distinguish a directive responder from a facilitative one” (Straub 225)? For me, by keeping these questions in mind, I am reminded of how to move away from the paper-bleeding-with-ink style of editing. I now attempt to produce commentary that addresses the student I am helping as my equal, while at the same time organizing my suggestions for improvement into easily understandable categories and solutions.

To do this with Carter’s commentary, I utilized two very different concepts that have become almost sacrosanct in our writing pedagogy classroom: the removal of “you” and the usage of the narrative to a list style of editing. Although more challenging than I had originally anticipated, removing the word “you” from my edits completely altered the tone of my corrections. The almost judgmental type of instructions I had used before were transformed into kind suggestions that established a relationship of constructive editing between two intellectual equals. I then incorporated this change into my new style of providing commentary. By opening with a narrative instead of just jumping to the “here is what is wrong with your paper” section. This way, I was able to convey to Carter that this was one step in an on going conversation about possible changes she could make to her paper, not a list of the commands. Furthermore, I put as little as I could into the margins and instead, listed my comments at the end of the paper organized by subject matter. The effect of which was two fold: I was better able to see what were the most crucial overall areas for us to discuss when we met in conference, and it allowed her to see where and when she was repeating the same mistakes. Furthermore, in these final end comments, I also attempted to make suggestions to her that could nudge her in the right direction without trying to grab control of the session and her paper. 

As a result of this preparation, when I went to meet with Carter in person, I felt that we were able to use our time extremely effectively because I already knew what I thought we needed to cover and therefore, we had more time to address what she felt were the weak areas of her own paper. The first area we worked through was Carter’s thesis. For her paper, Carter chose to deeply analyze a poem by poet Adrienne Rich. Although it was clear from her thesis that she was conducting a very close reading on a particular poem, her thesis failed to provide her reader with enough of a road map to help them understand where this paper whished to go and what the point of its argument was. I got the sense that Carter’s thesis had developed while she wrote the paper and as a result, her original thesis was unclear because she did not know exactly where she was going and what she was arguing until she finished writing the paper. So instead of spending a lot of time manipulating the word choice of her weaker thesis statement, at the very beginning of our session I directly asked Carter what exactly it was that she hoped the paper would argue. This strategy, introduced to me in the article “Helping students write literary analyses: Some challenges and opportunities for writing center consultants specializing in literature” was incredibly affective. Yothers argues that “the process of articulating what they find to be significant about a particular story is often the first step toward developing a coherent thesis” (Brian Yothers 6). This was exactly the case with Carter, as the thesis she formulated in her own words verbally (which I quickly wrote down as she spoke), was a clear and succinct depiction of what the final paper was actually arguing and how it attempted to unfold that argument. Not only did this mean we had effectively restructured Carter’s thesis, therefore providing a more solid foundation for the whole paper, but also that the new product was still entirely made of Carter’s own words. Therefore, I was able to avoid anything close to the situation where “usurp control over student writing, making sweeping editorial changes and dictating what should be said or how it should be presented from top to bottom”(Straub 247) that Struab cautions against.

Once the framework of the paper was more concrete, we narrowed in on Carter’s topic sentences. This was an area that both Carter and I had highlighted as a place where some improvements could be made. As a result of Carter spending so much time exploring the poem, there were portions of her work where she was so close to the material that she forgot who her audience was and that they needed to be guided through her breakdown of the poem. As the Writer’s Web page on Transitional Words and Phrases expresses, it was important for Carter to “Use transitions with enough context in a sentence or paragraph to make the relationships clear.” To most effectively help Carter with this, I followed the advice stated in The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors by Leigh Ryan. Although Ryan suggested this strategy for tutors helping students in the beginning stages, I found it equally successful for Carter who, while having already written her paper, needed to realign the spine of it. Ryan suggests, “Ask the writer to start drafting the thesis and topic sentences. It might be helpful to see the main ideas worked out in full sentences. These sentences can be a jumping-off point when the writer goes to compose on his or her own” (Ryan 46). Therefore, Carter and I looked at the structure of her topic sentences and talked about how they often just jumped right in to a new idea without making sure the reader understood the transition from the previous thought to the new one. We thought out possible suggestions for how to change the wording and I kept asking Carter questions to further her thought process. Once she began thinking of several good possibilities, I left it up to Carter to decide how she wished to rewrite them so that the work could once again be entirely her own.

The last issue Carter and I discussed in-depth during her tutoring session was her conclusion. Although it did a nice job of piecing it all together for the reader, summarizing the paper’s main points, it did nothing to push the paper further. Like many students, she fell into the trap of “ending with a rephrased thesis statement that contains no substantive changes,” which Writer’s Web specifically advises against. Although careful about my tone, I employed another suggestion from Ryan by asking her questions similar to “why do you feel this is important” and “so what do you think is the point?” (Ryan 42). In the past, whether it has been helping a friend with her paper or working as a tutor for international students, getting a student to move beyond restating the claims of the paper in the final paragraph is surprisingly hard to do because when students attempt to make their conclusions more thought provoking or bring up a new idea their conclusions often become too global with unsupported claims about the nature of society or history or something of the sort. Personally, I have had a hard time in the past doing this successfully and I found that teaching how to write a good conclusion is almost as difficult as actually writing one. However, using the “so what” question for the first time with Carter, I saw how such a simple question can force a writer to really consider their paper on another level.  From hearing the new ideas Carter came up with just during the consultation time alone, I found that this strategy is the most successful. Carter was able to turn her conclusion into something that “suggest[s] results or consequences” instead of just summarizing (Writer’s Web). I have found for getting writer to think deep at the end of their papers because by constantly asking yourself “why does the reader care about what I am saying,” it helps you to produce a conclusion that answers this question, but still remains specific to your topic area.

What was also really interesting about this exercise was when we switched roles and I became the student. One of the things I struggle with as a writer is revision, as I often have lots of trouble catching my own mistakes, especially on a first draft. Having Carter’s commentary focus on the content of my work and not the small punctuation and grammar errors was a very different experience from what I am used to with other tutors. There have been times when teachers have embarrassed me because my first drafts contained errors so much so that when they finally got around to talking about my ideas, I was too disheartened to listen carefully. It was clear that Carter was employing Ryan’s theories on revisions by the way she handled my work. As Ryan suggests, she focused more on “global revisions…the paper’s overall development and organization” (Ryan 48) and instead of making be feel stupid for my sentence level errors, discussed them with me and was “carful not just to correct mistakes but also to explain how [I] can identify and correct future sentence-level errors” (Ryan 51). 

Therefore, the experience for me felt much more respectful and conducive to my future improvement.

Although I was unsure when I first entered this class how the works we were reading could possibly be as helpful as the lifetime of personal knowledge I had acquired, I now firmly see the impact of their teachings. Although often subconscious, the ideas and suggestions they provide have become the foundation of how I approach working as a writing consultant and have firmly changed both my definition and opinion of the writing consultant process.