2/13


I seem to have two groups of students at the writing center.  I’ve got American undergrad rhetoric students who need help with fulfilling the requirements of the assignments, with applying rhetorical devices, with theses, transitions, synthesis vs. summary etc.  On the other hand, I’ve got two international graduate students, who have a completely different set of needs.  Both are working on long papers for publication in peer reviewed journals, so I’m finding myself working through their papers for more local problems.  They’re not confident about certain small grammar points.  They know the rules, but they cannot always completely control them.  Their writing is long, technical, well-organized, and sophisticated.  They want to improve their writing by discussing grammar and word choice, and that’s the area where they are weakest, so that’s what we do.

I’m not sure exactly what the implications are for improving our tutoring based on TAW’s conclusion.  There are a lot of questions and a lot of possible further research.  It seems like there are a lot of variables to consider.  The conversation between the student and tutor on p.172 was an example of the student becoming frustrated because she couldn’t figure out what the tutor was fishing for.  I think it’s okay for the student to be a little frustrated sometimes if they’re on track to solving a problem on their own.  If the tutor had been more direct, maybe it would have been less polite.  The section on politeness under “Instruction Strategies” (pp. 174-175) was interesting. If I recall correctly, Brown and Levinson (1987) didn’t just suggest that being indirect is polite, but that being indirect is a concession to people’s basic need to be autonomous, but that directness can be a concession to people’s basic need to be part of a group. In this way, hedging, modals, and soft requests might actually seem unfriendly to a student, while a direct request like, “okay, tell me what your thesis is,” would actually put the student at ease because this is the way we talk to close friends.

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