Writing Center Class Spring 2018

I've run into the most reading problems with students at the prison. Many students there have GEDs because they didn't complete high school prior to entering the prison system. Some understand a text easily if it is read out loud to them, but struggle to get through a text reading on their own. Last time I tutored there, both another tutor and I worked with a student on reading strategies. He does fine when the material is familiar, but once it becomes more complex, theoretical, or outside of the scope of his personal experiences, it becomes harder for him to understand. We showed him how to identify topic sentences, and how sentences concluding paragraphs offer summaries of the paragraph's content. We mostly discussed strategies for getting through the text and understanding each component part. However, he might also benefit from strategies that help him connect the pieces into a whole argument. He might like the "what it says" and "what it does" strat...

One of my students, a freshman taking rhetoric, I think does have reading comprehension challenges. After reading Bean's chapter, I think I can locate his difficulties as a failure to reconstruct arguments as he reads, as well as issues with vocabulary and complicated syntax. Mostly we have been reading his own writing, and I have noticed that he reads aloud slowly, and repeats sentences. But when we have to read instructions from his teacher about assignments, he often struggles to keep the different parts of the prompt in his head as he goes, and is stopped on vocabulary he doesn't quite have a grasp of. We usually end up talking through the one-sentence prompts for a few minutes (what does analyze mean, how is he expected to answer the question in the prompt), and he is able to talk about what he doesn't understand and ask questions. His reasoning, once he understands the prompt, is good, so I think there is some complication in translation from written word to meaning. ...

If reading-to-write issues are abundant in the learner’s native language, so they are in the learner’s L2. In fact, students don’t really start reading more than one-paragraph texts until the end of their second year (Intermediate II); and other more complex texts don’t appear until the third year studying the language. When I was teaching Spanish Intermediate II, I always felt the fear and the pain in the students’ faces every time they had a reading assigned. They would come to class with their summary and their questions, but they were not even sure if they got the text right. In any case, we would dedicate and entire 50-minute class to break down the text, discuss it, question it, etc. In the end, students would leave the room with a better idea of what they initially had intended to read from home. While those practices were very good for the students, it’s is also true that they were very time-consuming. And I don’t even think we applied a quarter part of the strategie...

While I think the suggestions in the Brice article are all valid and feasible, I feel like what is missing from this discussion (not just this article, but the discussion of helping students read difficult texts) is the issue of the texts themselves.   The article does suggest ways to "awaken student interest" in readings, but what if readings were based on what is relevant and interesting to students?  Rather than starting with a dense, predetermined text, finding out what already interests students and letting that help guide text choice might be a better way to develop interest in denser texts (perhaps those related to the original interest, just deeper, or more academic). I know this is not always feasible with predetermined texts (dictated by districts, departments, etc), but I do wonder how taking an approach of considering how students read and what they already do might decrease the sense of reading deficit. I can NOT read graphic novels, nor do I use twitter....

What I found perhaps most interesting about the Bean chapter is how I myself have never considered the ways in which I learned the reading skills he outlines. And I'm not even sure if I could say that I perform all of the reading habits well (cultural context, tracking complex syntax?). It also took me a long time to be "good reader." Even through the first few years of graduate school, I couldn't understand how to read just for the gist or main point because I was paranoid about missing other elements. No one taught me that that was actually a productive way to read, and instead I felt like I was maybe not going to get away with something. As I read Bean, I kept wondering if this is a document that would benefit student learning to show them (or an abridged version). Showing students what exactly is allowed and expected--even possible as an end goal--would offer a sort of transparency about a process that seems rather opaque (so opaque in fact that when Bean origi...

I found strategies like Show that All Texts Reflect the Author's Frame of Reference and Thus are Subject to Interrogation and Analysis  and Writing 'Translations' particularly helpful for my students who struggle to delineate form from content in their assigned readings. They carry this confusion into their writing by either making clear arguments without providing adequate context, or mimicking the convoluted syntax of academic writing instead of articulating in terms clearest to them what they mean. One question I have is, what are some resources we can point students to help them parse through academic jargon (especially when their instructors have not provided them this resource/ training in class)? Are there existing "Reading guides" online like those described on p.141?

                I am tutoring a student enrolled in an Interpretation of Literature class who has reading-to-write issues. The instructor assigns some challenging texts from authors like Faulkner and David Foster Wallace, and I can tell that the student struggles with reading comprehension. The student usually brings a short response to the weekly reading to our tutoring session and we work on it together. As it stands, her reading skills are quite literal and don’t scratch below the surface of a text – and she doesn’t see herself in conversation with the author. I try to ask probing questions, but I feel like they don’t get us anywhere. I ask my student what Faulkner might be trying to convey by including the coffin in As I Lay Dying , for example, and she will tell me it is to hold Addie Bundren’s body. Which is true, but also not at all what the instructor is looking for. In my attempts to get the student to...

I think Bean's chapter offers a many potentially useful strategies for getting students engaged with a text (despite, perhaps, taking the fishing metaphor a bit too far). Recently, students in the Foundation course have been frustrated over the reading quizzes. They are multiple choice and should be fairly easy for anyone who has read the whole text. There are, however, a number of students who read the whole text (and I'm inclined to believe them), mark it up, and otherwise thoroughly engage it, but they are still missing one or two questions on the quiz. These students are already making a commonplace book for the class, but I think I could incorporate some of Bean's other strategies, like margin notes or having them "translate" a text (we're thankfully beyond the middle English portion, but the texts don't get that much easier for a while yet). My primary concern is with reading-to-write, not because I think my students are failing tremendously, but b...

I had an American rhetoric student who was writing a paper on a controversy surrounding some automated technology.   She was to find three rhetors invested in the controverst with three different views on the issue, and she was to synthesize their arguments. She chose self-driving cars. The first reading problem seemed to be the assignment sheet.   The student’s first attempt did have three different articles summarized, but they were informative articles explaining how self-driving cars work.   She had tried to frame the controversy in the form of the question, “Are the lives saved by self-driving cars worth the cost?”                     One article was from a tech magazine.   It described the “lidar” technology used in the sensors of the cars.   Although this tech was originally prohibitively expensive, the cost is falling dramatically.   She explained that the owner...

I actually tried two things this last week. One day, I reverse engineered outlines with my students, and another day, I went in with no materials, just me (and water). I've done outlines before (not in such a conscious way), but I always have paper and pen with me! I found that I needed to be aware and present in both situations, just in different ways. However, I didn't feel it had an effect on which of us was the primary agenda-setter. When I was doing the outlines, I was really paying attention to the macro issues and the narrative structure of each piece. For example, I worked really intensively with a public health/epidemiology grad student on his intro. In this case, the outline really helped me to understand what he was talking about! By looking at what each paragraph conveyed, and how they connected with each other, we were able to find ways to align his text more closely with his verbal explanation of his study. I tutored with this focus for about three hours straigh...

Lape's discussion of toggling can easily be integrated into Brice's example of cross-cultural rhetorics. In fact, it seems that even though we "toggle" between HOC/LOC with native English speakers, it provides a "polite," "safe," and thoughtful approach to working with students from other backgrounds, cultures, countries, and languages. I was thinking about this in relation to when an ELL student says to me in tutoring sessions, something like, "I want it to sound fluent" or, more specifically, "I need help with grammar and verbs to sound fluent." I'm always caught with this request because "fluency" is not just about grammar (I've had many students in my classes who are native English speakers but whose writing does not sound like a native English speaker's); nor is "fluency" only about word choice or expression, because there is a deep grammatical/patterned element to it. But as I was reading La...

For this post I am going a little different and I'll focus on the draft from Noreen Lape (Chapter 4). Based on my previous readings in the field of SLA, I will critique and give some specific feedback to the author of this chapter. Essentially I express my reactions, and I point out things I didn't understand or that confused me in the chapter.   1) I get very confused with the wide variety of terms used in pages 1-6: English native speakers, English language learners (ELL), non-native speakers, second language writers, foreign language writers, non-English FL writing, EFL writers, ESL writers, English-medium/native language writing. This seems a lot to me, and then later you end up focusing on SLA strategies while talking about “FL writers. I would suggest to be consistent with the terms and use only L1 and L2 writers, L1 and L2 instructors, etc. I would avoid the terms “native” and “non-native”, because sometimes they can become controversial. ...