Beyond the Text >Chrissine Rios

As a writing tutor, sans grade book and the wedded authority, I am seated even closer to students than I was as an instructor. In a brick and mortar writing center, this closeness is easy to see as tutors and students sit elbow to elbow. Small talk begins and ends the sessions. Nods, smiles, and other nonverbal nuances further the face-to-face conversation. Online, the goal to connect with students as individuals remains the same, but remote communication must also go beyond the text if it is to evoke the human spirit that is so fundamental in all teaching and learning.

Communicating beyond the text first means reading without making assumptions about the writer based on the text. At the AACE e-Learn World Conference, Peterson, VanDam, and Wheeler stated that “the sense of anonymity that comes with online teaching can lull one into a false sense of safety against prejudice and bias” (2009, p. 5). This feeling of safety or belonging has its plusses as Peterson, VanDam, and Wheeler explained: one will participate more when “one is being evaluated on the content of one’s contribution, not anything else” (2009, p. 1). However, online, content can be telling, and any deviation from Standard American English can lead a reader to make assumptions about the writer’s educational level, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, even gender and race.

These assumptions about identity are not always harmful. According to Leiki (2009), “we tend to see the members of our own group as individuals” (ix). When we perceive others as having similar cultural backgrounds, we can accept them as having unique perspectives. Communicating as individuals allows us to shift our viewpoints to accommodate difference and meet in the middle where we can learn from and teach one another. This is essential especially to a writing tutor whose objective has always been to “change the writer, not the paper” (Carter, 2009, p. 8). Conversation logically follows as the cornerstone of Writing Center tutoring, and with the new Writing Coach Pilot, interactive workshops, Live Tutoring, and the Fundamentals and ESL programs’ one-on-one tutoring, the KUWC offers students and tutors more opportunities than ever to consult with students and communicate beyond the text.

Of interest however is the flipside of Leiki’s findings that we “see those who are not of our group as all alike” (2009, ix). Leiki’s concern and mine too as the ESL specialist in the Writing Center is for the multilingual students who write with an accent, who may not appropriately use articles (the, a, and an) because of different perceptions of count nouns, who seem to use prepositions loosely, interchanging “with” and “to” when in Bulgarian, for example, one would say “in relation with” not “in relation to” (D. Geteva, personal communication, November 19, 2009), or the students who use infinitives where gerunds (ing forms) ought to be and vice versa because they don’t hear the difference that a native English speaker does innately. These errors are no mistakes; they are choices informed by culture, one’s native culture as well as the student’s assumptions about the target language, in this case, English.

Communicating beyond the text therefore also requires learning to not always read differences as deficiencies for doing so risks stereotyping all those who write with an accent as being remedial learners. This assumption is not uncommon. The Conference on College Composition and Communication has thus resolved “to educate teachers about the length of the L2 [second language] writing acquisition process, and how, according to Virginia Collier, it takes at least seven years to acquire an academic vocabulary” (Severino, 2009, p.57). Although the KU WAC initiative involves assessing all students on their command of Standard American English, the standard does live along a continuum depending on the paper’s purpose, the subject, the writer, and the readers. I see this continuum most easily when I remember the American part of Standard American English. What is a standard American anyway?

In my effort to communicate with ESL students beyond the text, I hold weekly, one-on-one conferences in an Adobe Connect Pro meeting room. We are not elbow-to elbow, but we have audio and the option of video. We post text to the white board and talk about it. During these conferences, I function more as a cultural informant than a grammarian. I have also created a welcome video so that my ESL outreach is more personal. I honestly feel self conscious every time I view it, but as Peterson, VanDam, and Wheeler stressed, if “we hope to connect with our students in a significant way, we must shed some of that alleged anonymity”(5) that comes with teaching online. My belief is that if the students see me as a real person, an individual, then they might know that I will see them that way too.

References
Carter, S. (2009, September). The writing center paradox: Talk about legitimacy and the
problem of institutional change. College Composition and Communication, 16(1), 133-152.
Leiki, I. (2009). Before the conversation: A sketch of some possible backgrounds, experiences, and attitudes among ESL students visiting a writing center. In S. Bruce & B. Rafoth (Eds.), ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Peterson, T., VanDam, K., & Wheeler, L. (2009, October). Who do we think we are? Dismantling educators’ assumptions in the online classroom. Paper presented at the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education E-Learn 2009 World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare & Higher Education, Vancouver, Canada. Severino, C. (2009). Avoiding appropriation. In S. Bruce & B. Rafoth (Eds.), ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.


Did you know...
Chrissine backpacked from Minnesota to Guatemala and back by foot, bus, train, thumb, and burro? And this was before there were cell phones and internet cafes!

Chrissine is an ESL specialist in the Writing Center.