Saturday, October 2, 2010
Can you help me with Grammar? Ummm not really
I went to my second speech shadowing appointment this week, and I could tell from the beginning that it was going to be kind of awkward. The girl was clearly not from America and was having some trouble with both her paper, and the consultants suggestions. She was having a lot of trouble adjusting to American writing style- she explained that writing in Spain was significantly different. While professors here seem to value clear and concise writing, she said that Spanish teachers seem to value circumvention of topics and superfluousness... and its hard enough to make small changes to your writing style, so i can only assume that its very difficult to make larger ones. It was also the first time i had experienced the issue with grammar and the writing center. When she left, the consultant said that was it was hard to help her because she was asking for grammar help an specific sentences, and while thats the opposite of the speech center's mission, its what she actually needed to make her paper better. So what do you do when you can't really help someone in the way that they need to be helped? Is it ok to sacrifice the writing center's mission to help a person with who just doesn't understand how to write a paper for a Richmond professor? These are all questions that I'm sure will come up while working for the writing center and I'm eager to see how I will respond!
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The tensions between what the student wants and what the writing center wants will definitely be an interesting thing to deal with. Ideally, shouldn't the writing center's goal be to improve the student's paper and writing in general? I think that it would be fine to circle some grammar problems and possibly direct the student to writer's web to help them develop grammar skills. This would be in conjunction with aiding them in their writing in general.
ReplyDeleteWhen we get to the material on ESL writers, you will see that there are some differences with the way we work with them. While native speakers have internalized most of English grammar, there are some things that someone learning English can only learn if told directly. A good example of this is helping them with prepositions--they are really not intuitive! This is a good experience to share with the class when we get to the ESL section.
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