Two weeks in and I am still really enjoying all of my
writing-center-related activities. Thankfully, I finally got to spend some time
in the writing center. My first shift put a lot of my concerns at ease. I had a
few different people walk me through the website and I learned how to schedule
an appointment, make a record of an appointment, and register new students. I
also learned the filing system, and although it’s simple, I can already see why
it’s so important to keep under control. Heath showed me an email consultation
he was working on and explained the various steps he had taken to complete it.
I even got to meet Java, who I’ve heard is the writing center mascot. Best of
all, I experienced a little bit of the contagiously optimistic environment that
everyone has been talking about. My first shift really was a great one and I am
looking forward to spending more time in the writing center.
One thing that stood out to me during my shift was the large
number of non-native English speakers who come into the writing center. In the
hour and a half I was there, five students came in and four of them were
ESL/ELL students. This brought up a lot of questions for me about how to work
with different kinds of writers. What do you do if
there is a significant language barrier? What do I as a tutor need to know
about reading an ESL writer’s text and how is it different from reading a
native speaker’s writing? How do I move beyond grammar and punctuation concerns
to look at the higher-level concerns? It is very likely (guaranteed) that I
will encounter these and other questions while working in the writing center.
I’m glad that we will be covering the topic in class so I’ll have somewhere to
start when I sit down at my first consultation with an ESL writer. However, I’m
guessing that a lot of these skills come with experience and practice. Even
though I am a little nervous about working with ESL writers, I am also very
excited. I love spending time with people from other cultures because I always
learn so much about who they are and where they are from. I also feel like I
can relate on some level with my own experiences in trying to learn Spanish.
As far as the readings for this week go, I enjoyed the
introduction to Rhetorical Grammar, and
I survived through the first two chapters without too much pain. I really like
the idea of a grammar rule being a description of language structure rather
than a law. This definition gives writers decisions instead of rules. The
introduction also emphasized the fact that all people already have knowledge of
grammar and use it correctly in their everyday speech. This makes grammar less
intimidating and more accessible, which seems to be what the writing center is
all about.
Hi, Bethany!
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you had a good first week in the Center, and I’m glad you already got a chance to look over an email consultation with Heath. We’ve been working on revamping the service a bit, so it’s really helpful for everyone to spend time looking through them. At one of our next center-wide meetings we’ll return to our discussion about the email service to see if there are any tweaks we need to make.
We will definitely spend a lot of time discussing how to work with ESL students. Before we get there, though, we’ll spend some time working on how to prioritize all of the concerns we might have with an individual writer and paper. You’d be surprised how easy it is to fall back on focusing on later-order concerns (like grammar and whatnot). This is really easy to do when reading a paper that has a million things you’d like to talk about. So, we’ll talk a lot about how to pinpoint the 2/3/4 things that are the most important issues to address. Talking helps, but we’ll also practice! Like most skills, this one will improve over time. I highly suggest that all of the 303ers talk to the veterans after the sessions you’ll observe about how they decided to focus on what they did—you’ll find that most people find their own way to do this, and talking about this is incredibly helpful. Once you’ve got it figured out how to prioritize a session, you’ll then learn how to apply that to sessions with ESL students. The strategies we’ll discuss still work!
I hope you’re feeling better, Bethany, and I hope your weekend wasn’t a total bust!
~Melissa