Writing Center Class Spring 2018

                I haven’t had the opportunity to do any asynchronous online tutoring yet, so I’m not really sure what the challenges or advantages could be. There is a risk that I would go full on teacher-mode and start grading the draft and making edits instead of pointing out one or two mistakes and asking the writer to go through and identify/remedy the rest – a tendency that the Bedford Guide calls “antithetical” to best Writing Center practices (93). Remington’s article convinced me of the efficacy of modeling good writing in my feedback, “demonstrating the skills I discuss” (3). I also agree with Remington that asynchronous online tutoring allows the tutor to take on the role of the “abstract reader,” helping students realize how important writing for your audience can be (2). I’ve also (rather guiltily) use stock responses when grading my Rhetoric papers, especially when I see the same problems over and...

I’m not really sure what the biggest challenge in asynchronous tutoring is.   I think maybe it’s having to anticipate student questions. There’s no chance to explain something and see if the student understood; you’ve got to make the concept clear the first time.   During a synchronous tutoring session, I had a student ask about when she could use “one of those clauses with ‘that’” and she pointed out a relative clause.   I thought she was asking the difference between a restrictive and not restrictive relative clause and launched into a long-winded explanation.   She didn’t interrupt, but when I’d finished she clarified that she wanted to know stylistically when a relative clause is appropriate. If she’s made a note about her question on an online form, I’d have answered the wrong question with no chance to remedy it. Another possible pitfall with asynchronous tutoring can be seen when we compare the benefit of online tutoring that we can “step away from the a...

One challenge I anticipate with asynchronous online tutoring is clearly conveying to the student which suggestions are optional and which edits are necessary (for correct grammar, actually responding to prompt, etc.) One advantage asynchronous online tutoring seemes to have over face-to-face tutoring is sending the students with clear notes. I've noticed that even when I ask or encourage my students to note what I suggest/ new ideas they have in our sessions, they write minimally because we are pressed for time and so do not get to articulate for themselves general writing rules or principles they could follow long-term. In forcing both myself and the student to generate clear notes about whatever we're working on, I imagine online tutoring could foster deeper learning in this respect.

I've never done official online tutoring (of course I send emails to students about papers, but that doesn't seem the same), so I'm rather wary. Both the Bedford and Remington mention drawbacks to asynchronous online tutoring that result from its "static" nature. I'm inclined to agree with all of these. I rely, perhaps too much, on "reading" people in session: body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, or other physical cues. It makes the back-and-forth in session easier for me to direct or lets me know what I need to spend some more time on. Both of these things are necessarily missing from an asynchronous online session because of the medium. I think the Bedford indicates four important advantages for asynchronous tutoring: time, collaboration, anonymity, and a written record. These are, indeed, advantages, but I was more taken with Remington's idea of modeling, both implicit and explicit. Giving student's the opportunity to see tu...

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...