Multilingual Writers and Writing Centers - Softcover

Rafoth, Ben

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874219639 ISBN 13: 9780874219630

Verlag: Utah State University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Multilingual writers—often graduate students with more content knowledge and broader cultural experience than a monolingual tutor—unbalance the typical tutor/client relationship and pose a unique challenge for the writing center. Multilingual Writers and Writing Centers explores how directors and tutors can better prepare for the growing number of one-to-one conferences with these multilingual writers they will increasingly encounter in the future.

This much-needed addition of second language acquisition (SLA) research and teaching to the literature of writing center pedagogy draws from SLA literature; a body of interviews Rafoth conducted with writing center directors, students, and tutors; and his own decades of experience. Well-grounded in daily writing center practice, the author identifies which concepts and practices directors can borrow from the field of SLA to help tutors respond to the needs of multilingual writers, what directors need to know about these concepts and practices, and how tutoring might change in response to changes in student populations.

Multilingual Writers and Writing Centers is a call to invigorate the preparation of tutors and directors for the negotiation of the complexities of multilingual and multicultural communication.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ben Rafoth is Distinguished University Professor and director of the Writing Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he also teaches graduate courses in the composition and TESOL (Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages) program. He is the editor of A Tutor’s Guide: Helping Writers One to One and coeditor of ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. He served as an executive officer for the International Writing Centers Association and is a recipient of the Ron Maxwell Award from the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Multilingual Writers and Writing Centers

By Ben Rafoth

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2015 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-87421-963-0

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1 The Changing Faces of Writing Centers, 
2 Learning from Interaction, 
3 Academic Writing, 
4 Corrective Feedback, 
5 Preparing Ourselves and Our Tutors, 
Glossary, 
References, 
About the Author, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Changing Faces of Writing Centers

From the time they were laboratories in the first half of the last century until today, one hundred years later, writing centers have evolved with higher education generally and the teaching of writing in particular. Writing centers have been around a long time and have made a difference in the lives of many students. Today, the face of writing centers is changing along with the worldwide expansion of educational opportunities. The foundation of writing center pedagogy — one-to-one instruction — is still a critical asset in the writing curriculum, but it is also labor — and intellectually — intensive, meaning that there are not enough well-qualified tutors to meet students' needs. Growing numbers of students from around the world turn to writing centers to learn to write in their native languages and in English, and at advanced levels. They seek degrees that will usher them and their families into the modern economy and secure their futures with good education and rewarding careers. Writing program administrators seek the same thing for themselves, in fact. Chris Thaiss et al. (2012) observe that "the drive to become literate and, therefore, to teach literacy, usually in advanced forms, is sparked in almost every case by student and staff desires for academic recognition in the international research community or by desire for career success in the global economy" (9). People everywhere want many of the same things.

Education and jobs are intertwined with a host of other motivations. Among the students I interviewed, the desire to be good citizens, partners, and family members as well as to find happiness all had personal roots tied to education and careers. These are the life goals for millions of people abroad and in the United States who pursue dreams at great cost to themselves and their loved ones. In rural China, for instance, according to an article in the New York Times (Bradsher, Feb. 17, 2013), families make sacrifices to sponsor college attendance for one or more of their members on incomes that average around $5,000 a year. The report calculates the annual cost of higher education at a Chinese university for a rural family to be between six and fifteen months' labor. For a Chinese family to send a member to college in the United States can cost not only a lifetime's worth of savings but much of their income while the child is growing up — for boarding schools, special tutors, and language classes. Moreover, proficiency in English is not just a requirement for getting into schools in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, and other popular destinations — it is also needed for admission to most good Chinese universities. Given how intent so many students are on learning advanced English, are today's writing centers ready for them?

More Writing, More Writing Centers

Families around the globe are helping to escalate college enrollments that are changing the face of higher education worldwide. In the growth economies of Asia, Brazil, India, and China, new university campuses are springing up in record time and established ones can barely expand fast enough to meet demand. College enrollments worldwide are expected to grow by twenty-one million students by 2020 according to a study conducted for the British Council (Sharma, University World News, March 13, 2012). This represents a huge rise in overall numbers and an average growth rate of 1.4 percent per year. China, India, and the United States will continue to see increases, while the fastest growth is expected to occur in Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, and Nigeria. The study projects that the largest higher education systems will likely be China with thirty-seven million students, India with twenty-eight million, the United States with twenty million, and Brazil with nine million. Elsewhere, Mexico has opened seventy-five new colleges and universities since 2006 (Lloyd 2010). In Saudi Arabia, thirty-five new colleges and universities have opened since 2000. India plans to double the number of students enrolled in higher education and open about 200 new universities in the next five years (Chauhan, Hindustan Times, April 25, 2012).

For US higher education, this rise in student numbers means continued growth in the population of international students as increasing prosperity overseas creates opportunities for travel, immigration, study abroad, and graduate education, with the United States being a preferred destination. For writing centers, this growth means more multilingual and multicompetent writers (Cook 1999) for whom English is but one resource in their communicative repertoire. A tutor's knowledge of another language is valuable not only for the cultural insights it gives them but also for the shared experience of language learning and figuring out how to overcome communication obstacles. Learning a new language builds pedagogical skills most monolingual writers take for granted. People who live and work among multiple languages acquire skills for gauging when and how to move between languages, and they learn a greater variety of the expectations people have for different kinds of conversational interaction. According to Canagarajah (2006a), multilingual students no longer see themselves as located within one language or another but as shuttling between languages to achieve their diverse goals for communication.

For today's NNES students, these goals will continue to include control over the academic discourses of English. To achieve this control, though, they will use all the resources available to them, including tutors, teachers, peers, family members, online translators, textual borrowing, and downloadable apps. Writing centers will still be a tool for gaining advanced literacy and a place where tutors help students, in one-to-one conferences, to express their thoughts. But instead of language proficiency, says Canagarajah (2009), in the future "the versatility with which we can do things with words" (20) will matter most. And while English may remain dominant, the advantage that multicompetent, multilingual users have over monolinguals will only increase.

This advantage is apparent in multilingual tutoring sessions. Miguel, a tutor at Bronx Community College who is bilingual in Spanish and English, described for me a difficult session he had not long ago that started out in English. The writer was a female history major. "She pushed me to answer all her questions and didn't want to think things through," he said. "She became very agitated." So, Miguel switched to Spanish and they continued to talk for a while. "She was very anxious when we talked in English," he said, "but in Spanish, she calmed down. Spanish created comfort for her." I asked him how he knew when to switch back to English, and he said, "When the student reads the assignment and we see concepts — these have to be understood. That, we do in English." He added, "Being sympathetic to the language of students helps. It says you recognize, 'I am dealing...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Utah State University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0874219639
• ISBN 13: 9780874219630
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 167
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland