Sean Tyler Post 3- Tutoring L2 Writers

In my past experience, tutoring non-native speakers of English can often incorporate more discussion of vocabulary and definition of terms. Students sometimes wish for a different definition of rhetorical or literary terms, so rephrasing instructions or looking up words together is often very productive. When working with literary assignments, or any piece with sources, it can be helpful to review the literature with the student or check in with them about any issues they may have had understanding particular terms or phrases. Checking in with a student about their understanding of a source is not unique to tutoring non-native speakers, but it can be especially useful.

 Higher order concerns like adherence to the assignment, logical organization, and strong arguments are still very important and the approaches to them do not meaningfully differ. Issues regarding words usage, vocabulary, and grammar can come up sooner in the tutoring process than they may otherwise occur. Non-native speakers are much more likely to want to discuss vocabulary and word usage and state that as a concern when beginning a tutoring session.

 

Most of the issues I have encountered are grammatical, or less frequently syntactic. I have seen students have some difficulties with irregular verbs, multiple word verb forms, and subject-verb agreement. Students can struggle with verb tenses or keeping plurals consistent throughout a sentence. Most students I have worked with have done well overall with lexical transfer. Non-native students are often interested in learning new English idioms and expressions, but I have not often seen students using phrases from their first language that don’t translate.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Andrew post 9

I think it's vitally important for writing center staff to keep abreast of writing center scholarship. Because students who visit writing centers vary widely in their proficiency, their motivations for seeking help, and economic/identity categories, and bring in work from disparate disciplines, staff need to be adaptable to multitudinous tutoring relationships and scenarios. Requiring staff to go through practicum courses (held on maybe a biennial basis) and holding regular department forums where tutors can present research or seek counsel would help keep everyone on the same page with regard to the latest findings and debates in writing center theory and practice. However, I don't think that it's reasonable expect that each member regularly conduct their own research, since many tutors are graduate students or full time instructors whose resources are often already stretched thin on account of pressures to produce writing/research in their own field of study. Asking too m...
Read more

Andrew blog post #10

 I'm usually fairly confident working with writers outside my discipline. I think part of that has to do with my own experience as an undergraduate, where I switched majors from political science to literature to philosophy then, finally, to psychology. To my mind, basic critical thinking skills--the kind that I teach my students in my rhetoric classes--apply just as much to qualitative analyses as they do to quantitative/empirical analyses. Questions of audience and purpose factor into effective writing and communication--approaching any paper, regardless of the class that it's for, I always push writers to ask themselves how much information is necessary for them to provide to contextualize an argument, and remind them that each item of evidence they introduce has to be accompanied by an explanation of its relevance to their overarching thesis. One of my writing center students' first assignment for his rhetoric class was to write a paper about his major (bio-medical engi...
Read more

Andrew blog post 4

Perhaps one way to promote appreciation of other "Englishes," as the CCCC statement (as much as they would disapprove of the use of the term) is to recalibrate considerations of style in writing pedagogy, one that demonstrates that what we call "standard English" is but one among many modes of expression that can be modulated according to varying purposes/audiences. Many people, I think, don't particularly enjoy reading academic English, which, besides imposing oppressive standards on marginalized people, is often a clumsy, bland, and inefficient means of expression; writing is most effective when it comes off as the work of a singular voice and intellect.  Students' general education in universities should also include critical studies of how languages are products of conquest. This, of course, has been a constant throughout history--consider how Spanish and Portuguese integrated Arabic vocabulary by virtue of Muslim rule over the Iberian Peninsula. However...
Read more