I observed a tutorial yesterday, which was very enlightening. I was paying much closer attention to the interactions and language that was used--both by client and tutor--and noticed several things.
One, the tutor was afraid of silence. (I will call the tutor D.) D. would ask questions--very good, open-ended questions--but if the client didn't respond right away, D. would answer them. It's important to note that the client was an ESL student (I'll call her L.) and has not passed into regular writing courses yet. One of her most persistent questions was, "Is my writing really bad?" and "What can I do to get better at writing?" D. reassured her that her writing was not bad (and it wasn't, comparatively speaking). It was obvious this client lacked confidence. However, I don't think that D.'s fear of silence was helpful to L. And, because English is not her first language, I think she just needed more time to formulate answers. So I did learn one thing: as a tutor, when we ask questions, we need to not only give the client time to answer these questions themselves, but we need to be sure to be persistent in asking them, even if we have to reword the question another way.
Two, several of the things we discussed last week and read about in Listening to the World became very real in this session. For one, the student, from China, had a difficult time negotiating the idea of intellectual property. Her assignment was a summary and response to an article, and she often used pronouns interchangeably so that, as a reader, one could not distinguish between L.'s thoughts and the thoughts of the article's author. D. helped her clean this up, but I was never quite sure if she understood why it was so important. The other thing I noticed was L.'s tendency to hedge around the point, to give peripheral evidence rather than directly stating what it was she wanted to say. D, not knowing that this is a characteristic of her culture, noticed this and told her she needed to be more direct, but did not explain why. L. of course complied, but how nice it would have been had D. been able to articulate to her why this is important in our culture.
One last thing: L. asked if the Writing Center could help her understand her readings better, and D. knew that there was a resource for this on campus and excused himself to go check on it. The second he left, she started asking me all the same questions she had asked him. I hadn't said a word the entire time, so I was surprised that she was asking me. I made it clear that D's suggestions were great, and the only thing I added was that reading a lot--even if she doesn't really understand everything she reads--is an excellent way to help her writing improve. Since I had just read this, I knew that research supported more reading for students to improve on their grammar.
After an hour and twenty minutes, I had a difficult time discerning how much the session helped L. D. asked her to work on the things they had discussed and bring her paper back again to see how she was doing. Until then I think it's hard to know how helpful the session was for her.
On an interesting note, I noticed that the professor's name on L. paper was that of my friend, the one I share rides with from Alma every day. So I mentioned to my friend that her student had been in the WC, and she said this student was one of the best in her class, had the best grasp of English and wrote quite well compared to the others. I didn't tell her anything else about the session, since I felt it was private, but I wasn't surprised that she was one of the stronger writers based on one thing: L. was very eager to learn and improve. This attitude, I think, is key to making stronger writers.
On a side note, I've gotten a couple more responses from my survey and they are still harping on grammar and spelling and want the WC to fix this. Sigh.
