2/20



2/20 post

I found Lape's many examples of "toggling"-- toggling between sentence-level and global writing concerns, toggling between word choice and idea development, etc.-- useful and highly pertinent to my own tutoring sessions. Before I read the chapter, I had been wondering about strategies to facilitate "toggling" in a more natural way than always prefacing my instructions to students with: "from a micro-level editing perspective" and "from a macro-, organizational level..." In Veronica the French writing tutor's example of toggling between word choice and idea development, I loved the strategy of opening up a word choice problem ("Give me English words that you think you want to use") to a larger writing question about the meanings the student wants to convey because it merged the two "problems" being toggled into one rich question the tutor and student could grapple with in  a more equal, less hierarchical dynamic.

Brice's narrative about Phillip in Northern Realities was also helpful because its very writing evidenced the tutor having tried to learn as much about the student's context as possible, following her own suggestion that tutors learn, not just teach. My favorite suggestion was #5, negotiating, and I'm curious what concrete strategies for negotiation we tutors can come up with for both second and first language writers.


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