Jose Di Paola - Blog post Chapter 4

              As someone assisting both a native English speaker and a multilingual student, I used some of chapter 4’s techniques. Note dictation was especially helpful. For my multilingual student, I asked him to write a back-and-forth between two characters in a short fiction story he is working on. I wrote what he said in exact words, and he was able to get a full conversation going without worrying about spelling or grammatical correctness. The actual quality of the dialogue didn't matter, the purpose was to just get him in each character's head. This approach was good for coaxing out inspiration during the brainstorming process, but I’m worried that it doesn’t help the student with writing on their own. The book chapter doesn’t suggest any approaches for this particular issue, which I felt was a major omission; the best I could come up with was to just ask my student to write things before the next meeting so they have an onus to put words on the page. 

            One thing I’m worried about is attention to grammar, tone, and other small details. These revisions definitely need to wait until the end of the writing process, as the book suggests, but for multilingual students that final is very difficult. As a writing center advisor, what do I tell a multilingual student who is worried about their writing quality on a sentence level? 

Comments

  1. Sean TylerSeptember 19, 2020 at 5:17 PM

    Sometimes I find it helpful to rate issues by severity (silently to myself of course). If the sentence level issues keep me from understanding a passage I'll guide us to work on those first. I usually just phrase approaching those as asking for clarification.
    I usually explain to students that I want to make sure they have a paper that matches the prompt and has everything it needs so we can do all of the smaller level editing later, and not have to go back and forth or edit things that will end up changed or removed. Sometimes just explaining why we are working from higher to lower order concerns is all students need.

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