Blog Post #4

I noticed a lot of parallels in the case study with Fei to my own work with a Chinese International Student in the Writing Center. Namely, the way both students identify "ideas" as strengths of theirs and "grammar and structure" as weaknesses. The student I work with told me she often feels frustrated by this discrepancy, and feels that her ideas are often more nuanced and developed than her peers, but this is lost in execution. When asked how structure is taught where she comes from (i.e. what were the conventions of the academic essay in her high school) she responded that it wasn't necessarily too different, but it was more formulaic. Straying from a template was discouraged and there was not much room for creativity (she had never written anything about herself before college).

I noticed that my student was not particularly interested in talking about how she wrote in her home country. I was the one driving the conversation and asking leading questions with the hope of uncovering some kind of useful contrastive rhetoric that would help drive our sessions. I think contrastive rhetoric is an attractive idea - that one language can hold the key to teaching the other - but it is likely idealistic and at its worst, only serves to scratch at some intellectual curiosity on behalf of the tutor as opposed to actually helping the student in their studies.

Comments

  1. KathFebruary 17, 2020 at 12:20 PM

    You raise some really great points about nuances of contrastive rhetoric--I think it's useful to have some understanding of "this is a part of English-language composition to add to your toolbox" for each student based on their experiences, but I appreciate that you point out how it might not be useful to simply focus on this as a prescriptive during sessions with a student. I wonder how this could be useful in other respects--maybe a pre-enrollment questionnaire with some detailed queries designed to make the student self-assess and examine what they need to specifically work on?

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