reading responses 3 and 4...because i never posted them before

Reading Response 3
International, Unfamiliar
In her article, “’Whispers of Coming and Going”: Lessons from Fannie,” Anne DiPardo describes an international student’s struggles to master writing in the English language. She doesn’t think that this particular student and her particular tutor necessarily depict common situations, but her story is all too familiar in that it seems to portray every frustration and enthusiasm I have felt as a tutor thus far. The role Fannie’s tutor played does not illustrate how I handle the situations I encounter, but the weaknesses she is forced to deal with that create those difficult situations are the same.
I love that DiPardo begins with her assessment that in order to be successful tutors, we must realize the multiple identities that we ourselves take on in order to get by in life. “Knowledge of our own shape-shifting can help us begin-if only begin- to understand the social and linguistic challenges which inform their struggles with writing…navigating between competing identities, competing loyalties.” (350) Looking at the struggle of international students in this empathetic way helps relieve some of the “inexorable frustration” I inevitably feel when working with these clients. She quotes Fannie saying, “’If you don’t know the language…then you don’t know who you are…It’s your identity…the language is important.”’ (353) Sometimes during a session I get so caught up with my frustration that I forget that the student is feeling the same way. It’s true that people define themselves using words. Loving communication as much as I do, I can’t imagine not being able to express my ideas in words, but, as DiPardo points out, that is one of the major weaknesses of non-native speakers.
Fannie’s weaknesses apply to almost every foreign writer I’ve encountered so far. “While she named her “sentence structure, grammar, and punctuation” as significant weaknesses, she also added that “I have a lot to say, but I can’t seem to put it on paper…it’s like I can’t find the vocabulary.”’ (355) The first part of that list is not limited to ESL students; English rules of writing are ridiculously confusing and even some of the best writers have yet to master each and every rule (mostly because there are so many more exceptions than there are rules…). The hours I’ve spent correcting parts of speech, word placement, subject-verb agreement, tenses, and comma rules have only been a slight annoyance in the context of sessions. Most of the aggravation is precipitated by the latter part of Fannie’s list. There is a clear inability to express ideas on paper with these students. I ask questions; I receive silence or repetition of a re-phrased version of the last sentence. I instruct them to add commentary; I’m left just as confused as before. I ask them to state the thesis; I get blank stares or worse, a list of details pulled from random parts of the paper that cannot possibly fit into a solitary focus. How can I lead the client to their own ideas when we are time-limited and the ideas are buried so deep that I’m not sure I’m even touching the surface of that realm of their mind yet. Most of these students do have ideas formulated in their own language. The trouble seems to be the translation into English. Add in the unending list of synonyms that are each most properly used in separate contexts and the goal seems inaccessible. This is the point at which my story differs from DiPardo’s.
Despite my irritation at the client for not being able to tell me what they’re trying to say and at myself for not being able to lead them to full understanding, I keep pushing. I learned about collaborative learning and almost immediately rejected it as the proper way to tutor ESL writers. “Morgan’s initial compassion had been nearly overwhelmed by a sense of frustration.” (358) My face always remains smiling because I won’t let what happened to Morgan happen to me during a session. If I am not getting through, I will try something else. Anything else. I have drawn funny images that appear in my head when something is ambiguous, I have used highlighters to help organize the paper, I have formulated ridiculous sentences that emphasize grammar rules they are having trouble with so they will never forget the rule, and I have encouraged them to come back to the center for a later assignment to keep working on the fundamental issues that appear over and over again. It has been fairly easy to adjust to different students- perhaps because I approached my job as a tutor worried that I wouldn’t be able to accomplish my goal of making students better writers. I had not previously worked with non-native speakers so the setting was unfamiliar, but I learned, and I continue to learn through every session, what my power as a tutor, and more importantly, as a peer can really achieve.


Reading Response 4
ESL Conferences
There is no denying the vast difference we encounter when we tutor international students as opposed to native-speakers. In her article, “Rethinking Writing Center Conferencing Strategies for the ESL Writer” Judith Powers points out that the traditional collaborative, non-directive approach works with native speakers only and new strategies are (or were) needed to tutor international students. There are two major assumptions behind this claim. The first is that those non-directive strategies work for all native-speakers; the second is that they don’t work for all ESL students. These are both wrong.
To assume that minimalist tutoring works for all native speakers seems naïve. Surely I am not the only tutor who has run into a client absolutely unwilling to put forth the effort to improve? The fundamental problem with a non-directive approach is that it is at the core the job of the student to employ it. We can ask leading questions all we want, but the reality is that if the student refuses to answer them, the session goes nowhere. Without their own motivation to improve their writing, the client is unable to benefit from any time with a tutor. Besides unmotivated students, there are also clients who really do need sentence-level revision. A client came to me the other day with a report she planned to present at a research conference. Most of the report was numbers pertaining to her results; the most I could do was give her sentence-level suggestions, point out any place that was confusing, and wish her luck. There are always exceptions to every rule- that has been true since the beginning of time. If I had asked leading questions about content when working with that student she would have been angry and left without any help. It was not my job to review and correct her study she had run with 3,000 participants.
The second assumption is not so naïve, but it is still flawed. ESL students do tend to respond much better to directive tutoring than non-directive, but why must we group all of them under one label? ESL student refers to anyone whose first language isn’t English. European students are very fundamentally different than Asian or Hispanic students and, as the story of Fannie made clear, Native Americans are another group that requires a specialized form of tutoring. I think even labeling ESL students by their nationality is too broad. Are we implying that native-speakers are all at the same skill level as far as writing goes? I hope not. Every single student we come into contact with is different. I certainly applied minimalist tutoring to a student writing a final paper for history who needed some guidance in developing her ideas and coming up with examples, but for the student who I believe had a learning disability and couldn’t see the ridiculous number of run-on sentences throughout her paper, I had to use a more directive approach to be successful.
As tutors of English, a language defined by rule-exceptions, writing center tutors are the last people who should be generalizing and categorizing. It is dangerous to implant ideas of how to tutor ESL students v. native-speakers into our heads because like Fannie’s tutor, we run the risk of forgetting that each student is an individual writer with their own experiences to bring to a session. If we don’t see them as individuals, how can we see them as writers? And if we don’t see them as writers, how can we possibly be doing our job?