Spring 2019 Writing Center Class

Blog Post #5. Consuelo I found particularly useful, in intercultural rhetoric, Investigative activities focusing on facilitating students to become “ethnographers” of their own writing (Liebman,1982, 1992; Liebman-Kleine) by asking them about their previous instruction in reading and writing, as well as their beliefs concerning the meaning of “good writing.” Raising awareness as a result of this seems to be productive for both the students in facilitating writing effectiveness and for teachers in planning class activities. Moreover, investigating about audience expectations or the criteria for “good writing” for different languages becomes also a tool for raising awareness. Definitively, initial assertions such as “[l]ogic (in the popular, rather than the logician’s sense of the word) which is the basis of rhetoric is evolved out of a culture; it is not universal” (Kaplan 1966, 2) are highly problematic. Does this imply that logic does not exist in some cultures?  Sim...

I found this reading tricky because it had many questions and few conclusions. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. The idea of rhetorical patterns differing across cultures makes intuitive sense, but the reading definitely complicated that idea. It also pointed out many issues regarding the manner of grouping: who gets put into which linguistic box? By country? By language? By "culture"? Also, what, really, is the difference between reader-responsible and writer-responsible writing? What does it mean to be "responsible" for creating meaning? Having been schooled in America, it is hard for me to imagine writing any way other than how I do it, which I think is accurately described as writer-responsible. At least, I always feel responsible for how my reader understands my meaning. Unambiguity is key in the kind of writing I have been trained to do. This hasn't really come up in my tutoring. So far I've tutored one international student, who was a Ja...

The primary difficulty I find with using concepts like CR and IR are that it is impossible to generate empirical data that would either support or refute the claims made by C/IR proponents. Many of the examples in the text are anecdotal at best and entirely subjective at worst. The C/IR idea also assumes an "all else being equal model" outside of the cultural/lingual hybridity stated in the text- there are certainly going to be individual-level influences that are going to be generated by different learning styles including learning disabilities and it would be an enormous challenge to control for this. This creates a sort of vagueness of what C/IR actually is which is perfectly exemplified by the fact that the name of C/IR isn't even agreed upon as accurate description of its intent. Ultimately these issues make it difficult to make valid generalizations about how any student or group of students may or may not have issues translating discourse and structure between lang...

Of course, or perhaps not so obviously, the main issue I've had in the classroom with nonnative students is the issue of contrastive rhetoric. As the article states, these students (who are nonnative speakers) are attempting to "acquire discourse-level patterns in their second language" (24). Moreover, in recent semesters, I've had at least one student come to me fully understanding they are attempting to acquire these patterns and therefore they are eminently aware how their writing might assume the foible that is "negative transfer, particularly of organizational and grammatical structures" (24). However, a concern I'm not sure the article explicitly confronts is that these students aren't worried so much about writing "in ways that are not 'English'-like," (27) but they are worried about how their writing skills might negatively affect their grades. In fact, a nonnative student has asked me on more than one occasion if I curve (o...

This week's reading offered a welcome challenge to my thinking about the intersection of writing and culture. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I like the idea of culturally-informed tutoring: I think that getting students to understand that writing conventions are themselves culturally constructed is both useful to the writing process and a productive way of developing critical thinking skills. At the same time, as the reading notes, culture is more "fluid [than it is] stable." It is one thing, in other words, to note that cultural norms influence our writing, and quite another to say that these forces are somehow inflexible or in any way constant. Though the reading seems to hedge about what to take from all this - acknowledging, in the end, that "teachers... may be disappointed that clearer conclusions did not result from the discussions in this chapter" - my ultimate feeling is that we should not be wary of "contrastive" or "intercultura...

I found the chapter from the Bedford Guide about the different kinds of writers we will encounter and strategies for supporting them in the writing process very helpful as I had a challenging encounter with a student. Some of the methods discussed in the chapter I tried during our sessions. For example, I used visual aids to help the student understand how to write an academic paragraph and gave her the rubric and draft checklist I use with my own students after we went over it. The student was still responsive and combative about paper writing strategies I have described. The student also couldn't answer comprehension questions about concepts I went over 10 seconds prior. One suggestion from the chapter that I think I will try during our next session is having the student take notes as we work through an assignment. I will also insist on the student bringing writing so that we can apply the concepts we are talking about to actual writing. 

This week, I have been really interested in the various kinds of problems students may experience at different stages of their academic careers. Besides academic concerns, Chapter Four of the Bedford Guide mentions social concerns and lifestyle concerns. Students may be facing social challenges related to romantic and peer relationships, and lifestyle challenges such as health, housing, and financial difficulties. I think this is really important to realize while working with students in the Writing Center. As the Bedford Guide indicates, "[t]hough you cannot—and would not want to—be privy to all of their concerns, it is good to remind yourself of the various personal issues that can affect students’ writing" (56). Indeed, it is important to look at students holistically and understand that they are not simply individuals who read, think, and produce papers; they are embodied human beings who have families, friends, and partners, who have to eat, ride buses, run errands, ...