Two Different Pages, One Assignment.... Cultural Awareness, Communication, and Coping Strategies for Tutors of ESL Students

Hello All, If you are not already aware, Ashley, Rebecca, and I are presenting at the MWCA Bright Ideas Conference at Madonna University next Saturday. Going from the title, I can briefly explain that we are going to explore the challenges that culture and communication can present while working with ESL students. In response to those challenges, we will provide a variety of coping skills for tutors. The presentation will include a lecture, hands-on assignment, and a discussion session. As things are starting to mesh together for our presentation, I felt it would be a wonderful opportunity to find a common theme that the tutors at the OU Writing Center use based on your own training and tutoring style. If anyone has any interesting stories that include a specific challenge, a new way to approach this challenge, and the response from both the writer and yourself, I think we may be able to incorporate that experience into our dialogue. In any case, I love stories, so even if you have one that is not ESL specific, I would still read it! Regards, Genevieve

ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors

Hey everyone! In my downtime I read an article titled "ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors" by Cynthia Linville. I found this article to be pretty interesting. It gave a scenario of a writing consultant who was tutoring an ESL student. The student came to the writing center because he wanted the tutor to fix the errors in his paper so that he would get a passing grade. This is a lot like what we have been talking about with students e-mailing us their papers so that we can "fix" them and how people tend to view writing centers as basic fix it shops. Anyway, this articles goes on to talk about tips that writing consultants can benefit from when working with an ESL student. It says that we need to let the student know that we aren't going to just focus on lower order concerns, but we will address them when necessary. We, as consultants, need to be patient and help any student we are working with. The author states that it helps to take an ESL students paper and just go line by line to help them with sentence structure and verb agreement. This helps the student pinpoint exact places in their paper where they may be having difficulty. Even though at times it may be hard, we should try and avoid making corrections for them, they need to learn from their mistakes so they can correct them in the future. This will help students to become better writers. Our focus is to make every student a better writer rather than making better papers. I think this was a great article to read. It brought out existing points that I had previously learned and it also enlightened me with new information. At the end of the article the author gave some links to helpful websites. Here is one that I will share with you: http://a4esl.org/q/h/grammar.html

Students Emailing Papers

Hello Everyone, I came into the center today and checked the OUWC email and found this email awaiting our reply: Writing Center, Hello, I am a current student at Oakland University and have a question concerning your revising policies. I attend Oakland on a full time basis, but live about an hour away. I would like to have a paper I am writing corrected, but find it inconvenient to travel to campus, especially with gas prices being so high. I am hoping that I can email you my paper and then again receive it, corrections and all, via email. This would be an ideal situation and I hope it won't be a problem. You can reply to me at this address. Thank you for your time. I thought I would share it with all of you to get your opinion on this matter. I personally feel the student would not be gaining much from simply emailing his paper. It seems as though he just wants a spell check, as he claims "I am hoping that I can email you my paper and then again receive it, corrections and all, via email." I emailed him back with the Writing Center's hours as well as the satellite hours. I also voiced my concern over simply emailing his paper back and forth. How would you all have responded? I worry I may have pushed him away by not offering what he desired; however our purpose is not to spell check and proof read. Any major problems with his writing could not be brought up simply through an email. I was also unsure whether we had done such a thing in the past. If I was wrong in my response to this student please do share! After all I won't know unless you tell me. :) Hope all is well with everyone! Lea

APA- Issue Number

I was browsing through the library's "Writing Resources for Students" and I was clicking and clicking and I came upon an APA guide in the APA official website. In the guide, there is a disclaimer about electronic resources and the things that need to be included in the references page. If you find a journal online: "For journal articles, always include the journal issue number (if available) along with the volume number, regardless of whether the journal is paginated separately by issue or continuously by volume. This change in reference style from the fifth edition of the Publication Manual is intended to make the format for journal article references more consistent." This is a gray area for many students who write in APA because professors either demand the issue number, or they don't care either way. This is an update in the electronic references guide, and it popped out at me because I have been confused on whether to identify the issue number or not because of professor preference. Now it is a rule and I would mention to the client if they are also unsure. The "Writing Resources for Students" is almost as entertaining as the "Harvard Writing Center" website... American Psychological Association. (2008). Electronic references. APA Style.org. Retrieved September 8, 2008, from http://www.apastyle.org/elecmedia.html

Responsible for reader's health

Hello all, I was browsing the Internet and lazily googled "writing center resources", and came across the Harvard writing center resources. This website is very entertaining and informative. I have found it a great way to refresh my memory in an entertaining fashion. The title of the post is in regards to a suggestion about comma usage. The writer recommended that if the comma rules were forgotten, then remembering to be considerate of the reader and assume the responsibility of their cardiovascular health (natural pauses indicate comma placement) can aid in knowing where to place commas. In any case, I will be refereing back to this site for later reference when writing my own papers, and I would suggest this to any writer who is having trouble writing. http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wricntr/resources.html

Consultant Welcome

Dear Consultants: The OUWCWriteSpace blog is a complement to our other professional development (PD) outlets. It offers us an additional way to meet without the contraints of real time and to share our consulting successes, questions, and mishaps while they are fresh in our minds. As such, you can add blogging to the downtime activities' menu. Each week by Friday, I would like at least one of us to post a short anecdote and a question, a short article and a query, or some other item of interest. I'd rather these posts emerge organically from our experience in the OUWC or from our reading, but if a volunteer schedule does not yield results, I might turn to assigning each of you a week. IF our consulting schedule becomes too laborious to accomodate blogging on site at the OUWC (during your regularly scheduled shift), I will gladly compensate you for more extensive posts, such as locating an article on a timely topic, linking to it, digesting it for us, and querying our experience/opinions. Instead of adding the hours to your time sheet, please email me with PD-Blog in the subject line, and I will add the hours as a separate entry. If other PD options emerge, please bring them to my attention. For example, I need consultants to help me facilitate a consulting simulation and practice session for 9th graders in Writing Academy that will sponsor with Pre-College Programs on Saturday mornings in October. I also have an opportunity to bring some of you into a 5th grade language arts classroom to model consulting and workshopping. These are some of the events for which I will provide additional compenstion. If it is agreeable to you, I plan to invite RHT 320 students to share our blog later in the semester. For now, I have limited this invitation to the course faculty, Barbara Hamilton and Marshall Kitchens. Well, this is all I can offer for now. It's literally time for me to get the bagels, or we won't have a palate-pleasing meeting at 8 AM. Sherry