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.

The ESL Workshop and Forum Series

The ESL Workshop and Forum Series provides a safe place for multilingual students whose strongest language is not English to discuss writing and collaborate. There are four workshops in the series:

1: Captioning a Photo

Students discuss an image of an American barbershop and  collaborate on a  paragraph “caption” in response. Students approach writing as a process with emphasis on ESL concerns such as transitions, prepositions, and  vocabulary choices.

Cooper, M. (1994, Sept. 13). Louis McDowell gives neighborhood
     girl a haircut as her mother looks on. [Photograph] Retrieved
     from http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/paterson/
     index.html

2: In Your Own Words:

Students discuss a video on “English mania,” analyze excerpts from the video, and  collaborate on a  paraphrase and summary with  emphasis on ESL concerns such as interpreting meaning, using synonyms, avoiding plagiarism, and using APA citation style.

3: Proposing a Solution:

Students examine the American approach to an explicit thesis and logical organization while discussing the difference between emotional and rational claims. The workshop features a video on an illegal immigrant who had his savings confiscated.

4: Reading and Research Strategies:

Students discuss research topics and search terms, explore different types of sources, examine the bibliographic information needed for APA citations, and learn reading strategies such as skimming a complete text, speed reading, and close reading.

Although individuals who identify as ESL have diverse backgrounds: cultural, linguistic, and educational, the workshops provide a common ground, promoting a sense of community and empowerment.

For more information on ESL Tutoring and Outreach Services please contact Chrissine Rios, ESL Specialist at crios@kaplan.edu.

Untangling the Web > Chrissine Rios

“Writing is like a spider web,” wrote one student in response to the prompt, “what is writing like?” And he continued, “but I am not the spider; I am the fly.” At the time, his analogy didn’t excite me the way the comparison of writing to washing a car or hiking a mountain did. I wanted to know the students’ attitudes toward writing at the beginning of the term, but I also wanted them to see writing as I did, as a process. Yet wetting, sudsing, then rinsing, even packing, climbing then surmounting, when applied to writing, undervalues prewriting and the recursive dynamic of the process and similarly over simplifies the purpose, making outcomes more important than meanings.

My favorite analogies align writing with relationships. In this way, writing is about getting to know another, and in the process, also one’s self, or more, one’s mind. College students, from their initial attraction and flirtation with an idea to the inquiries, insecurities, and revealing moments of truth, are for the most part dating a topic, and before long they feel confident enough to say something about it openly and with conviction and maybe even with flair, unless the student’s interest uses another language. Thoughts clear in the mind are harder to communicate when using a foreign language, especially with the eloquence needed to affect a reader in a particular way.

Yet every day at Kaplan University, students engage in the writing process using a foreign language: Standard American English. ESL students, many of them graduates of U.S. high schools and the rest having obtained qualifying scores on the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), come to KU to study and succeed. They commit, engage, learn, and have as much to say as their native speaking peers about topics both important and relevant to them. Yet when one’s form determines the outcome of the communication more than one’s thoughts and intentions, heartbreak is sure to follow. It makes sense to identify errors to justify a grade, but feedback during the drafting process needs to nurture and encourage critical thinking.

Typically, nonnative speakers learn English in product-oriented ESL classrooms where error correction makes accuracy a higher order concern than the pursuit of ideas. My concern is that error correction will remain at the forefront of their college writing experience if tutors and professors alike become too quick to tend to the inaccuracies in the text to untangle the ESL writer’s meanings. No denying it, ESL students must learn to use Standard American English to succeed in college and beyond, but only more writing breeds better writing; Standard American English is not the embodiment of syntax alone.

Culture also informs the ESL writer’s concept of effective communication. Harkalu (1999) described prewriting discussions in college composition classes as opportunities for ESL students “to learn the values and assumptions of the culture of the mainstream classroom and strategies for communicating successfully in writing in that culture” (p. 112). Accordingly, WAC positions students to learn the culture, content, and rhetorical conventions relevant to their professional pursuits, but writing instruction being secondary to content in non‐composition courses, there may be fewer opportunities for students to engage in prewriting discussions with peers about their writing. And when this part of the process receives little attention in class, students rely more heavily on the rough draft review by a tutor or professor to make sure they are doing their assignment correctly. But correctness does not equate to college‐level inquiry or ideas. Hence my student who compared himself to the fly, entangled in his own writing, a victim rather than a weaver.

To his credit, Vygotsky (1896‐1934) also described writing as a web: a “web of meaning,” referring to the “deliberate semantics,” the required relationships, and the intricacy of writing compared to speech (as cited in Emig, 1983, p. 127). And how intricate the web woven by thoughts in more than one language! But if those thoughts have not been clarified during the exploratory and recursive process of writing, the result will be repetition, disorganization, shifting perspectives, and faulty agreements. There are tutorials that address these issues in the Writing Center, but helping students to uncover their viewpoints, ideally early in the process, would do more to improve these areas and the students’ overall command of Standard American English while also producing more confident and thoughtful, college‐level writers, and that to me, is the perfect outcome.

Untangling the Web, Chrissine Rios from Chrissine Rios on Vimeo.

Emig, J. (1983). The web of meaning: Essays on writing, teaching,
     learning, and thinking. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.
Harkalu, L. (1999). Generation 1.5 meets college composition:
     Issues in the teaching of writing to U.S.‐educated learners of
     ESL. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Chrissine Rios is a staff member at the Kaplan University Writing Center.

[This article was originally published in our August, 2009 issue.]

One–on-one Tutoring Available for KU ESL Students

One–on-one tutoring is available to ESL students at the KU Writing Center. As soon as a student discloses being ESL, and only if a student self discloses—being multilingual is not a disability, quite the opposite, but privacy rules still apply— an instructor can refer him or her to the Writing Center for tutoring.

In addition to the Writing Center’s regular services, The ESL Outreach Program provides ESL students with Personalized Language Plans and a bimonthly workshop series designed to be a safe place for ESL students to write, question, and discuss college level English (ESL students only, please!) For more information about ESL Outreach including workshops for faculty, please contact Chrissine Rios.

[This article was originally published in our August, 2009 issue.]