“A Writing Centre Isn’t for ‘Broken Students’” – Strategies for Supporting EAL Writers

by Daniel Chang & Dr. Amanda Goldrick-Jones 

    One challenge that many writing centre (WC) tutors encounter is giving feedback on the writing of post-secondary English-as-additional-language (EAL or ESL) students. Conferencing/tutoring strategies for native English-speaking writers do not always work for EAL writers (Moussu, 2013). For example, EAL writers might not notice errors when they are asked to read their work out loud, or they might not possess the same linguistic intuition as native English-speaking writers. But to what extent should peer-tutor training focus on EAL issues or errors? Is there a danger of stigmatizing EAL writers? As Terese Thonus (1993) has argued, tutoring that focuses “attention to grammar and mechanics after organization and development” (p. 20) can benefit native and non-native-English writers equally, but only if the student writer participates in “the negotiation of meaning” (p. 20). Such negotiation can be seen as a process of helping EAL writers articulate higher-order elements as purpose, structure, and key arguments, encouraging them to take ownership of their whole piece. Essential to the writer’s process of negotiating meaning, Thonus suggests, is the interaction of peer, tutor, and instructor comments. We believe instructors can do more to help writers re-vision the WC as a site for negotiating meaning.

     Post-secondary instructors often refer EAL students to writing centres for improving writing skills. However, a disconnect still exists between the writer-centered principles that inform WC tutoring practice—most famously articulated by Stephen North—and what some instructors (and desperate students) think writing centres should do: “fix” or “clean up” the writing. Indeed, a basic principle of WC training is that tutors do not directly edit or proofread student essays (Myers, 2003). A recent news bulletin from the University of Victoria has clearly stated the position that editing undergraduate student essays or lab assignments is considered to be a violation of academic integrity (Woollard, 2017). Yet as Thonus noted over twenty years ago, WC tutors did and still do experience pressures to “fix” errors—pressures resulting at worst in a scenario where “the frustrated ESL student and equally frustrated tutor square off against one another” (1993, p. 21).

     Research currently being conducted in the Student Learning Commons at Simon Fraser University (SFU) explores WC tutoring strategies that meet the challenges of giving feedback to EAL writers without crossing the boundary into editing. The SLC uses a peer-tutoring model in which trained undergraduate students provide one-on-one consultations. Data collected from undergraduate writers since early 2017 include electronic appointment information, tutors’ reports on EAL consultations, and student writing samples with revisions based on tutors’ feedback.

     Statistical analyses of the appointment data and tutors’ responses show that a student’s language membership does not predict the types of writing challenges or errors (e.g. higher order concerns versus lower order concerns). This finding is quite promising because in second language acquisition (SLA) literature, EAL writers have been seen from a deficit-oriented perspective (Guo, 2015; Marshall, 2012; Tangen & Spooner-Lane, 2008). Post secondary teachers might stereotypically assume that all EAL writers’ work will have grammatical errors, and the written products might not be as good as the work produced by native English-speaking students.

     And yet, instructors tend to refer EAL writers to the writing centre to “repair” the grammar. Particularly, Anthony Paré of the University of British Columbia has pointed out how instructors conceptualize the “writing centre … [as] a place to ‘send the broken students’” (Heng Hartse, 2016). Paré suggests writing centres exacerbate this misconception themselves because they tend to operate as a “cross-curriculum” general writing tutorial service in some North American post-secondary institutions. They lack content-area or discipline-specific writing expertise to support writing issues beyond “just fixing up the grammar.” Our data, however, suggests that writing challenges are in fact cross-disciplinary; every post-secondary writer has writing challenges, regardless of discipline, linguistic membership, writing abilities, or academic residency.

     In other words, regardless of whether they are native English-speaking students or EAL students, undergraduate writers benefit from a tutorial approach focusing on higher-order concerns first. Such concerns are frequently discipline-specific or genre-related, which all academic writers must negotiate. To that end, WCs can benefit from appointing peer tutors from a range of disciplines and inviting student writers to work with peers who are familiar with their particular discipline. This approach allows the WC to become a space for not only negotiating meaning across disciplines to reach a broad range of audiences, but also familiarizing writers with specific genre expectations.

     Another finding from our research is that the most frequently reported EAL writing challenges are sentence logic and word usage. It is understandable that EAL writers need time to formulate their thoughts and translate thoughts into sentences. Sometimes, during the process, the logical structures of the sentences might be lost due to either interference from their first language or their lack of language proficiency (Silva, 1992; Watcharapunyawong & Usaha, 2013). This finding suggests that writing centres should also be a safe space for negotiating this level of meaning as well, allowing writers and tutors to co-construct or /scaffold meaning and develop their own awareness of sentence structure.  Ellis (2008) has proposed a taxonomy of giving feedback to EAL students. While these feedback strategies were originally proposed for oral communication, we believe these strategies can also transfer to, or work for, the WC tutoring process. The best example of using these strategies in WC tutoring practice is to recast (or clarify) students’ meaning of sentences on paper and provide opportunities for the students to negotiate their meaning with the tutor. That is, if a student paper contains incomprehensible sentences, the tutors can implicitly point out the difficult-to-understand sentences and then ask the students for meaning clarification (Ellis, 2008).

     Overall, our research indicates that while EAL students require additional support in their writing, one’s linguistic membership, in fact, does not predict the types of writing challenges a student will encounter. Both across and within disciplines, student writers share the same likelihood of having writing issues. Labelling student writers according to their linguistic membership or writing ability might not be the best way to give support or to frame a referral to the WC. Although EAL writers tend to struggle more than native speakers with second-order issues such as sentence logic and word usage, the WC can train tutors to use support strategies that apply to all writers, such as recast or clarification, to accommodate a range of writing issues. In this way, we may more effectively convey the message to instructors that the WC is not a repair shop for “broken students,” but rather a space where students experience, and are supported in, a dynamic process of constructing meaning and becoming part of a writing community.

 

References

Ellis, R. (2008). A typology of written corrective feedback types. ELT journal, 63(2), 97-107.

Guo, Y. (2015). ‘Unlearning Privileges’: Interrupting Pre-Service Teachers Deficit Thinking of Immigrant Students with Origins in the South. Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, 7(1), 34-59.

Hartse, J. (Producer). (2016). Episode 2 – Academic Writing in Canada with Dr. Anthony Paré [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from https://www.sfu.ca/celltr/faculty-development/language-u-podcast.html

Marshall, S. (2009). Re-becoming ESL: Multilingual university students and a deficit identity. Language and Education, 24(1), 41-56.

Moussu, L. (2013). Let’s Talk! ESL Students’ Needs and Writing Centre Philosophy. TESL Canada Journal, 30(2), 55-68.

Myers, S. (2003). Reassessing the “proofreading trap”: ESL tutoring and writing instruction. Writing Center Journal, 24(1), 51-70.

Silva, T. (1992). L1 vs L2 writing; ESL graduate students’ perceptions. TESL Canada Journal, 10(1), 27-47.

Tangen, D., & Spooner-Lane, R. (2008). Avoiding the deficit model of teaching: Students who have EAL/EAL and learning difficulties. Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties, 13(2), 63-71.

Thonus, T. (1993). Tutors as teachers: Assisting ESL/EFL students in the writing center. The writing center journal, 13(2), 13-26.

Watcharapunyawong, S., & Usaha, S. (2013). Thai EFL Students’ Writing Errors in Different Text Types: The Interference of the First Language. English Language Teaching, 6(1), 67-78.

Woollard. J. (2017, Aug 25). A fine red line: when does editing a student’s work become cheating?. University Affairs/Affaires universitaires.  Retrieved from http://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article

 

About The Authors

Daniel Chang
Daniel Chang is a third-year PhD candidate in Educational Psychology. His research interests
include EAL (English as an Additional Language) university students' academic literacy
development, L2 reading and writing relationships, and use of metacognitive strategies in
reading and writing.

Dr. Amanda Goldrick-Jones
Amanda started her writing life as a newspaper reporter in Toronto and Vancouver before
receiving her BA and MA in English Language at UBC. After teaching writing and
communication at UBC and Langara College, she studied rhetoric and professional
communication at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where she received her
PhD. She then served as assistant and associate professor at the University of Winnipeg's Centre
for Academic Writing and helped develop the major program in Rhetoric, Writing, and
Communications. At SFU’s SLC, Amanda has continued to develop and coordinate a variety of
writing opportunities including writing-peer training, in-class workshops, and support for TAs
who work with undergraduate writers.