Questions for 4/21/10

Doodles:
The article talks about many rules that ESL students have for writing in their home country that do not apply to english writing. How is this similar and different from the rules we were taught in high school that do not apply in college any longer?

Influence of culture:
How might recognizing a students cultural background make them feel in the tutorial session?

Creating a Common Ground:
The WATCH approach seems very similar to what we have learned to do in a normal tutorial session with a native speaker. What might need to be added to this approach to make it more geared towards ESL students.

Writing Center: Week Eight

Tonight was another no show at the writing center. Good thing I have lots of posts from earlier in the semester.

Questions for 4/12

Planning for Hypertexts: What are the differences you see in a tutoring session with a hypertext document compared to just a paper with a subject matter you are not familiar with?

Protocols and Process in Online Tutoring: It seems to me that a lot of the strategies for online tutoring are similar to face-to-face tutoring. Do you think it would be easier for our younger generation of tutors who are more used to non-face-to-face interaction to adapt to some of the drawbacks to that do exist in online tutoring?

Rule of 3rds: Could learning more visual techniques like the rule of thirds help in tutoring session with hypertext documents?

CARP rules: How could the visual strategies of contrast, alignment, repetition, and proximity relate to writing or make you a better writer?

Tonight there was a no-show. We waited for twenty minutes to make sure the writer would not show up and then went back out into the beautiful warm weather!

Ideas for Training Session

It is clear that the mentors will need something to refer to after the sessions are over in case they forget some of the things that were taught. I think that a wikispace would be best for this "manual". This makes it impossible for the mentor to lose the manual and waste trees making many of them. It also opens up the information we are putting together to the public. If we are going to spend time making this we should try to share it with as many people as wish to see it.

As far as the first session goes, I think it really should just be the basics. Explain how the ideas and organization are far more important than grammar. Also include the importance of revision and focus on that. The next sessions can be used to talk about specific types of students.

I think this session should not just be lecture and discussion about how to tutor, but actually doing it. Have each student bring a piece of short writing with them and split up into pairs and switch paper (in a sense, what we did for our mid-term). If this were to happen it would be important to have experienced writing tutors in each group there to help if a new mentor does not know what to do.

Questions for 4/5

Bedford: As a writing tutor, it is a common rule that you should not try to give the writer too much information in one session for any type of student. Do you think our writing center is set up in a way that makes this easy to do? Should a follow up session be required for students who have more problems with their writing?

St. Martins: I observed the ESL students in my time at the writing center as not being prepared and not being passive, these two things are different from the qualities Harris describes. Do you think what I observed were rare cases or are ESL students just as different from each other as any other normal students?

Writing Center: Week Seven

This session was a follow up on the session with the same ESL student that I observed last week. The writing consultant is very patient with the writer from the start after dealing with a long and tedious session last week. They start out by establishing where the writer is in her writing process. There is no conclusion to the paper but there are quite a few pages already written. She says one of her goals is to shorten the paper. They start by looking at a section in the paper that the writer had underlined that she knows she wants to work on. There are a lot of errors that are found from the consultant reading the paper out loud. This helps the writer a lot with her paper because the consultant can show the writer where in the paper her translation to english does not make sense. They underlined sentences that did not make sense and then identified what was not working within that sentence. The writer has not properly cited her quotes yet. They went over the basics for citation. They discussed how she needs to add analysis after each quote. This the writer seemed to understand very well. They also talked about the danger of using too many quotes. The writer didn't really seem to grasp this concept well at first. This may have been because it required a larger revision to the paper as a whole. The consultant then described how you can still use some ideas from the quotes but make a comparison of the two books in the paper. The writer then requests that they talk about the conclusion. This is a case where they are simply having a conversation and trying to create a conclusion idea. The consultant finds a sentence near the end that the writer considers one of her transition and explains how that would be good to put into the conclusion. The writer is then confused about what to do about the transition because she didn't realize she just needed to make a different conclusion. After discussing the conclusion, they go over the proper mla format for the heading of the paper. It seems like the paper should be due soon since she has been working on it for a week, so I think it was good to go this since the writer doesn't know the way to format the paper. The consultant then attempts to wrap up the session and asks if there is anything else the writer wants to work on. The writer takes this opportunity to ask the consultant to read over a section of the paper to check the grammar. They pointed out a lot of the same things they talked about earlier and it made it seem like the writer was trying to turn this into a "fix-it-shop" type session. The consultant tried to avoid this by pointing out a grammar point of where to use the word "and". The hour was up after this and it seemed like the session was overall very productive. The consultant was very polite and encouraging as the writer was leaving the WC. In this session it was clear that the writer was more comfortable with the consultant. She was interjecting(not in a rude way) and asking questions about things she did not understand. It was good to see the writing seeming to be more engaged in the session! This engagement didn't last the entire time. It is certainly hard I can see for the writer to stay focussed for an entire hour.