ESL Students at the Writing Center
I find ‘Affirming diversity’ by Muriel Harris extremely informative and I have a lot to learn from this article. I will pick several sections and show how ESL writers are depicted in Harris’s article; Harris shows support that ESL writers do not need to be tied to their native lands.
He begins the article by discussing how tutors at the center think about the center and imply its pedagogy. “Tutors, then, are trained to move writers into the active role of making decisions, asking questions, spotting problem areas in their writer and finding solutions,” says Harris.
He then introduces his questionnaires and the number of ESL writers who participated in it. Around 85 students, who represented the diversity on Purdue’s campus well, took the questionnaires. These students had lived in America from a few months to many years and had “no formal instruction in English” (Harris). Despite a huge linguistic and cultural barrier, these students’ answers were comparable to native English writers’. Harris’s questionnaires revealed that the ESL students think of their teachers as individuals who “work with large groups, lecturing on general concepts and course content” (Harris). ESL students also stated that teachers are more knowledgeable and have an expertise in their field. ESL students felt that "tutors gave advice," (Harris) and this showed that an ESL student, like native English speakers, enjoy having a one-on-one conversation while they get their specific needs addressed. However, ESL students added that they wanted the opportunity to ask more questions per session.
I plan to incorporate this into a session next time and notice if students want to be lead in a conversation, or want to lead the conversation. Having seen both sides of the spectrum, I will not be surprised if I see a student who likes a mix of both.
Harris’s students stress that they come to the writing center to have their questions answered. They feel that students in America are “more involved in the learning process,” and another ESL student stated that students are “not so active” (Harris). Hence, it’s only obvious to take time to advise consultants to talk politely. Harris suggests not to question students directly by saying “Why” or “How,” but ask them to “please explain” again.
Moving on, Harris talks about the ESL students who responded to his second questionnaire. Most of the students preferred to have a friendly conversation with the consultant before the session began and these students like to work in face-to-face friendly environment. “I like friendly atmosphere while learning as I always have a better result,” (Harris) stated an ESL student. Even thought ESL agreed, with the academic, with views on collaborative learning, many students wanted help to explain to the tutor that ESL students will make mistakes that native writers will never make. “Please do not laugh at what you see,” (Harris) said a student expressing that the ESL group was similar to any other group of writers on campus.

Pervasive And Unconscious Xenophobia: The Downsides

Pervasive And Unconscious Xenophobia:
The Downsides

Working With ESL Students And Writing Across Borders was a film about ESL students struggling to meet expectations in the United States says a lot about what it is like to be in a foreign land. More importantly, it talked about how the processes and products of writing in other cultures is a lot different than that of the United States.

The film used examples to talk about how some countries had less linear structure. It also talked about how the main-point (the thesis) doesn’t always come at the beginning, but rather at the end or in the middle. I find that Korean students as a lot of questions about putting main ideas up front, and they seem to know enough that American academia expects them to put their main points up in the thesis, but sometimes they aren’t quite sure how to organized their paragraphs and sentences. This reveals to me how non-linear other languages can be. It’s clear to me that these clients that I work with sincerely believe that they should build up to their main ideas rather than putting them out front, but as someone who learned to write while working on their high-school newspaper and learned AP style formatting, that is almost counter intuitive. But, I understand that this is a mere cultural difference, and that they are no less and no more falsely indoctrinated into a baseless construct any more than I am.

The challenge though, is helping them preserve their cultural identity in their writing while also helping them to meet the expectations and demands of writing at an American university. When in doubt, I try to help them meet expectations. Even non-ESL students have to adhere to certain standards of grammar, structure, content and length in their academic writing, and it wouldn’t be fair to ask less of the ESL student. Even when a writer is limited by certain parameters, they are allowed to shape themselves between them and each writer has a unique opportunity to express themselves in a way that is original and authentic. The job of the consultant in my view is to help the ESL student do just that.

This film did a lot to help me articulate an acknowledgement of this phenomenon, and it certainly has helped me to be more aware of these cultural differences as I work with students from many lands.

I think it is worth mentioning that doing these posts later in the semester has allowed me to reflect more about how I have applied what I have learned in the classroom to my work as a consultant. Does procrastination pay off? It offers a lot of consequences, obstacles and frustration, but so does vigorous preparation and forethought. Both procrastination and forethought offer different consequences and different rewards, and by procrastinating I am a merely in-tune with things. My cultural identity as a caucasian BoHo slacker is reflected in my writing process, and I think we should embrace that.

Carol Severino Und Das Vorlagenrennen von Linguistik!

Carol Severino And The Master Race Of Linguists
Carol Severino Und Das Vorlagenrennen von Linguistik!

Carol Severino believes that the writing center and the university is a valuable social-laboratory for cultural exchange and progress.

She argues that since writing centers bring together people of different ideas, thoughts, world views, and rhetorical sensibilities in such a way that offers a collaboration of skills and wisdom that benefits both consultants and clients as well native English speakers can learn about the writing process from the perspectives of those of non-Natives speakers. The sentiment is authentic, but in practice it’s a bit more of a sticky wicket.

Languages barriers often serve as a barrier to the consultant client relationship. It can be difficult enough to talk them through writing process, structure, word choice, noun and verb agreement and semi-colons. After this, there isn’t much time to ask them what their writing process is in their native language or in another context. Sometimes the best you can do is acknowledge and be sensitive to the fact that the writing process and the writing products in non-English languages is different than in English. Even within the English language, the genre-appropriate rhetoric and process can be quite different between two fields like the natural sciences and the social sciences, and between humanities and biology.

While insight and new wisdom can be achieved in each session, Serverino does more to describe what happens and what could ideally happen more so than she suggests a soild model for practice. In that right, it appears that she had some good things to say.

There Is No Process Without The Product

There Is No Future Without The Present
There Is No Present Without The Product
There Is No Future Without The Process
There Is No Process Without The Product

Donald Murray Wished He Said It, But All He Did Was Think Of It.

I figured that since I did a presentation on Murray’s groundbreaking pedagogy and even defended him against baseless and erroneous attacks from my writing center colleagues I figured that it would be good to do a reading response to the article in Crosstalk. Additional motivation came from the fact that it is required for class.

Teaching writing as a process rather than a product is a pioneering pedagogy that took students away from things like grammar mapping and toward things like outlines and acknowledged that in the developed world everyone must write and that each person should develop a process that help them produce better writing.

Not only does Murray believe that the writing as process should be taught to students, but also he offers some innovative ideas about how to evaluate the deliverables in the various stages of writing. Murray seeks to look beyond giving a typical grade or score to the in-processes writing. He is an advocate for peer-review as well as teacher/student reviews that offers feedback and discussion. This is how Murray feels as though writing as a process can best be taught.

Murray doesn’t totally disavow the importance of writing as a product, but he has long been the advocate that the product is best served by minding the process. Murray was probably down with the notion that there is no future without the present; he himself could have said ‘there is no product without the process’. But he didn’t say that, I did. Just now. In a sense, I am better than writing education pioneer Donald Murray, aren’t I? The debate continues.

Has anyone else struggled with the writing of their research paper? I am just wondering if I am alone in this..

three and four

WORKING WITH ESL STUDENTS AND WRITING ACROSS BORDERS The film Writing Across Borders focuses on international students writing at American universities. It points out the difficulties of international students in meeting American professors’ requirements, and on the linguistic and cultural differences between writing in the United States and writing in other countries. One of the film’s key points is that people from different countries and cultures use different processes to produce different styles of writing from the American style. Subsequently, many ESL students have a hard time satisfying the requirements for their assignments, due to a host of issues such as organizational practice, sentence structuring, voice, grammar, and simply the way and timing in which ideas are presented in writing. Relating this to my taking Japanese for my foreign language requirement, I can certainly see these issues as becoming problematic for ESL students. Many of them speak much better English than I speak Japanese, and when I speak in Japanese, my words certainly have an Americanized organization and voice, along with cultural nuances, and most certainly grammatical errors. It is no surprise to see the other side of that when an international student comes into the writing center. In my own experience consulting for ESL students, this has proved to be undeniably true. For the consultant, it may be difficult to tell just how “American” an international student’s writing should sound, and most importantly, how much the consultant should scrutinize seemingly awkward phrasings and organization practices that result from a different cultural perspective. I have seen dozens and dozens of missing articles and prepositions, extremely awkward phrases and ways of stating ideas, and generally mistakes that would be the death of American students in ESL students’ writing. However, in a truly inclusive and open university, how much of this culturally influenced writing should be left to the individuality of the student, and how much should be changed so that more readers will be able to understand the writing? This is a most basic question that every consultant should have to and will have to come to terms with, before being able to help an ESL student in a meaningful way. The best answer I can give, and one that is somewhat supported by the film, Writing Across Borders, is that a consultant, whose job is to help the client express their ideas, not simply write for them, should allow a student to keep their own voice, but should also help them find ways of stating their ideas so that they will be clear to a reader of any background. This obviously means that each client will require different types of help, but that is the case not just with ESL students but with any client of the writing center in general. Consultants would do well to help their international clients see where they, say, may need to insert a comma or change one to a semicolon, insert an article or preposition to clarify a sentence’s meaning, or unify tenses throughout a paper. What a consultant should not do is try to change those parts of an ESL student’s paper that are irrelevant to another’s understanding of the paper, but are the results of the client’s cultural outlook. For example, if an argument is made in a more circular fashion than typical in English, but the argument is solid and understandable to an American or English-speaking audience and transcends the cultural divide, then there is no reason to push the ESL writer to go about making their point in a more “American” fashion. In this way, international students writing to a primarily American audience can be understood, but they still can retain the cultural perspective that they identify with and that undoubtedly is a part of their authorial identity. Furthermore, allowing an ESL student to keep their cultural outlook within their writing exposes readers from different backgrounds to different views on whatever subject is being written about, which is what a university should be all about. Ideally, the university, and by association the writing center, should be a place where different cultural outlooks intersect, resulting in a multitude of writing styles, and therefore, more exposure to different perspectives. When students of different geographical and cultural backgrounds are encouraged to write within their cultural outlooks, but in a way that is understandable to all English readers, writers, and speakers, the university can truly become “multi-cultural.” Different perspectives in writing will expose students of different backgrounds to various outlooks, further widening their outlook on the world.

RECREATION AND CHANGE THROUGH LITERACY I like to consider myself a fairly literate person, at least within the world of literature, but I am also literate in other activities besides reading and writing that, although they require different skills and thought processes, share in common with literary literacy the requirement of proficiency in a certain task or way of thinking. Playing guitar is one of the actions that I consider myself literate in, and it closely correlates with reading, writing, and speaking, due to its expressiveness and the need for a guitar player to know a guitar like his own body or mind. Similar to reading a skilled author, reading a song played by a fellow guitar player takes concentration and practice. After learning the guitar, or becoming guitar literate, one can pick up on the chords of a song and moreover the key of the song simply by watching another performer play. Active participation, an important practice in reading, takes on an even more interactive function in playing music. As a friend plays the blues in G, without a word, I can play harmoniously or melodically in symphony because of my experience. D minor is the saddest key, and I know to utilize that knowledge by accordingly playing something dark or sad. When I am at my best in guitar playing, I become one with my guitar, and it becomes as natural to use as a limb of mine, which I am completely in tune and in the moment with. Moreover, playing lead guitar (improvising with scales) to another guitar player’s rhythm (usually a chord progression) is especially like speaking. I have to be literate in the layout of the fretboard of my guitar, in order to be able to choose the notes and express myself through their arrangement, just as when speaking, I must be literate in order to choose my words and express what want to get across orally. Guitar is a language of the fingers and mind, as speaking is the tongue and the mind. Guitar is also similar to speaking in that I try to use expressive phrasing to effectively separate different sections of a guitar part, similar to how someone would speak in phrases and sentences, or even write in sentences or paragraphs. Paragraphs are the idea packages in which I conceptualize a world that I can create and exist in with others who participate in my writing, either by participating in a meaningful way in my life, by occupying my mind, or by reading my writing. The interactive nature of the mind, and therefore words, can create a world of literature, a world of the mind and of expression. This world of expression is one in which I thrive, even more so than the world of music, I often think. It is a world in which I can live beyond my own physical existence. Thru words, I have the ability to create, destroy, and re-create myself. In words I can be reborn. I can fashion my self my existence into whatever I want to be, drawing on all of my experiences and thoughts. Thru words, I can find meaning in the constant change that is existence; I am at once myself and everyone and everything. I realize that I have much to learn of literacy, and, in turn, much to learn about myself, but I feel that my tools of words and notes have allowed me the ability to sculpt myself into that which I want to be. I can create my own world, and I can create and re-create myself within this world. Writing and playing music are actions, and in my world, actions create meaning and the essence of self in an otherwise meaningless existence. People define themselves by that which they do. Literacy is an intentional gift, one which I take for myself through a process of continued experience and a continuous want to experience more. By writing, I literally carve myself into a literary being.

two

THE IMPORTANCE OF PROCESS AND ENCOURAGING IT IN UNPREPARED CLIENTS OF THE WRITING CENTER Donald Murray’s essay, “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product” argues correctly that the best way to create good writing is encourage the development of good writers, as opposed to simply fixing writing, which actually does the writer a disservice. I agree with Murray that writing is more about a process than the product, as the object of an instructor should be to make the writers themselves more capable, not just each paper. As Murray puts it, “repetitive autopsying doesn’t give birth to live writing” (Murray 3). From the writing center’s perspective, this is extremely important, as there are a limited number of consultants on a limited schedule, and if a consultant can help a client with their writing process, it may free a space for the next time that client needs to write. While thinking of writing as a process is certainly a better, more long-term solution to many writing problems, in the center, I have already been challenged with trying to help unprepared writers develop within the short 50 minutes allotted to us instead of just giving them ideas or doing the writing process for them. Just today, I had two clients who came in without any pre-written material or ideas, and who were looking for help figuring out what they should write on. Murray argues several of his 10 implications that are particularly important to the writing center and to the consultants at the center, specifically. These include such statements as, “The teacher supports but does not direct this expedition to the student’s own truth” (5), “the student uses his own language” (5), that the teacher teaches a student “to produce whatever product his subject and his audience and demand” (6), as opposed to teaching a specific product, that the “primary responsibility for seeing the choices [of where to take the paper] is the student. He is learning a process” (6), and that “the students are individuals who must explore the writing process in their own way…to find their own way to their own truth” (6). All of this emphasis on the student, or client’s, responsibility to their own writing and the teacher, or consultant’s, responsibility to foster the student’s discovery process instead of defining it seems quite the daunting task within the writing center’s 50 minute sessions, especially if a client comes in with literally nothing to begin with. How far a consultant can go in making suggestions and trying to get ideas flowing comes into question from both an ethical and professional standpoint, as well as generally caring about the client’s development as an articulate, independent writer. I try to get unprepared clients to come up with their own ideas through questioning them about the material and about the general concepts their assignments are based on, as well as getting them to brainstorm, outline, and list if it will help. One thing that this has taught me is that, writing being a personal process, clients must come into the center prepared to at least some degree or with some idea of what they think they might write on. The client I had today that did not even read half of the book they were writing on is not going to write a good paper unless they finish the book, no matter what ideas we were able to work out based on the half she did read. Likewise, the client writing a paper on Relativity will not be able to successfully organize her paper until she gets all of her ideas out, or at least brings them in to the writing center for me to help her organize. I, as a consultant, can give my clients favorable weather to fly in, but I can’t fly the plane for them.
WORKS CITED Murray, Donald M. “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product.” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Ed. Victor Villanueva, Jr. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1997. 3-6.