WEEK 13 - Chapter 8 Bedford SANJNA



I support the need for writing center staff to pursue research. Thinking back on the case study I picked from the newsletter, Brent Weaver's "Is Knowledge Repurposed from Tutoring to Teaching? A Qualitative Study of Transfer from the Writing Center," his research indicated a transferability of skills from the WC to the classroom and vice versa. From this one could extrapolate that it might be beneficial for WC tutors who also teach a class, to use those tutoring skills as consulting techniques when they interact with their students during office hours as Carol mentioned in her comments. In addition, being a tutor gives us a good indication of where students are struggling (with opaque homework assignments, for example), knowledge we can use when designing our own assignments. Weaver's research directly benefited those who read the article, offering us a new and deeper way to think about our work. 

 One thing I'd like to research under the right circumstances is a good way to help ESL students. From struggling to learn two languages in addition to English, I know that it is not easy. The best way I've found is complete immersion and time. Unfortunately time is against ESL students who have deadlines that come up much faster than their ability to process language. I would be curious to compare how ESL students are tutored in America (and within America, in rural v/s urban settings, poor v/s rich communities etc.) and how they are tutored in other countries. For example, I never learned the rules of English grammar. My knowledge of syntax came from extensive reading, from which I developed an ear for what is correct and what isn't. I would be interested to find out whether all the time spent teaching ESL students grammar (in schools) is more effective, or whether sitting the child/student down in front of a pile of books / English movies that they might want to watch, would yield faster and more sustained results.  

Comments

  1. Carol SeverinoApril 14, 2020 at 12:51 PM

    Comparing immersion in the language to learning grammar rules might be unrealistic since most ESL education in high schools and colleges involves both, but in different proportions. For example, there is what's called "extensive" reading and "intensive" reading. "Extensive" is for pleasure and to get the feel of the language. "Intensive" reading is to read to learn vocabulary and syntactic structures--e.g. for how to use the "not only....but also..." structure or "if clause, independent clause" with the various tenses. "If you do that, you will..." "If you did that, you would..." "If you had done that, you would have been.."

    I like the trend in second and foreign language education to expose students to controlled chunks of language that use the same feature and then ask students to derive the rule--say, from the above "If" sentences.

    There's more grammar instruction in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) contexts where English is not spoken or heard much, for example, parts of Latin America. The trend in high school US ESL instruction has been to focus more on immersion than on grammar--a strategy that is good for fluency, but not as good for accuracy. Students read, write, and speak more, but make more mistakes. A research study in which one class did immersion learning with no grammar and the other class of the same level did grammar learning but little extensive reading, writing, speaking, or listening might net the first group improving fluency and the second group improving accuracy. But that study should be more no more than a few weeks because it would be unfair to deprive one group of one type of instruction and the other group, the other type.

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  2. BriApril 15, 2020 at 6:02 PM

    I agree that the knowledge we gain as tutors is transferable to our own classrooms. I had this experience earlier in the semester with an international student. In one of the case studies we read, or maybe it was the Oregon University documentary we watched, someone spoke about the difficulty L2 speakers might have with group conversation. This idea was completely new to me and made me so much more aware of how my internationals students were potentially struggling. Sure enough, at mid-term I had my students do an informal eval, and one of my international students explained this exact challenge. In the future, I intend to have one-on-one meetings with my international students at the beginning of the semester to gain a better understanding of how I can help make class materials and group activities more accessible to them.

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