EWCA 2006-- Connecting the Dots June 26, 2006 Sevda Akyuz Bogazici University Writing Center Coordinator Different Strategies for ESL Writers in Writing Center Tutorials Bogazici University Writing Center History, Location, Tutors I founded the BU Writing Center in the School of Foreign Languages in 1994 right after I came back from the States. We work mostly with prep students and some from the departments. As you know, the medium of instruction at BU is English. So, our mission as the prep school is to prepare our students to the best of our ability to read, listen, take notes and write academic English in their departments which is a monumental task to accomplish in one year if you think about it. So, the writing center functions as part of this mission. We have two locations: one in Kilyos Saritepe Campus with a view of the Black Sea and the university’s own beach where four tutors work with approximately 300 students; and the other in South Campus where also four tutors work with about 800 students. The number of tutors working for the writing center varies from semester to semester since the funding is very limited and sometimes people find it exhausting and overwhelming and get involved in other projects the prep school offers. All the tutors are writing teachers who tutor in addition to a 20-hour-teaching load per week. There are no peer tutors also due to funding restrictions. We offer about 50 appointments a week, 800 to 1000 appointments a year. Next year, we are going to offer writing center tutorials in the North Campus, too, following a demand from some teachers working in that campus. We also have a new branch in the South Campus located in the Graduate Institute of Social Sciences that edits and proofreads theses and dissertations. Another group of four editors work there. The short to middle term aim is to transform that branch into a general writing center that not only edits but also supervises theses in their process of composition and offers workshops and seminars to especially graduate students across the curriculum, not just in social sciences. Tutorials and Tutoring Format Some general comments first: Students either come in with a written or typed essay or if they draw a blank about things to write on, they ask for help with topics or with overcoming the writer’s block. At the end of a session, 8 out of 10 students want to come back, so they ask for another appointment. By the way, they usually develop an attachment or imprinting if you will to the tutor and rather interestingly, refuse to work with other tutors. They wait for an appointment until that tutor is available. They also usually ask for a topic suggestion for the next session. We keep a small selection of reference books ready to use during the session when some students learn to use, for example, theasauruses for the first time. We do not give grades even though sometimes students can be really persistent. When they fail to get a grade from us, they try their luck with the question: “will this essay pass the proficiency test?” We decline to answer that, too. The process in a tutorial: Typically, in a tutorial with our prep students, after the initial greeting and a short social chat, we sit down around a small table and we, the tutors, first read the essay out loud because we still believe in the effectiveness of making the students hear their own words spoken by somebody else in catching usage errors or awkwardness of expression or sentence fragments. In other words, unlike some WC researchers and practitioners who find that editing by ear does not work for ESL writers, we find it quite useful in our experience. After the reading of the essay or research paper, we follow the inquiry method and start asking questions such as “what kind of essay is this?”, “how did you decide on the topic?”, “what guidelines did you follow?”, “can you point to or underline your thesis statement?”, “what points did you use to illustrate and support your thesis?”, “what specific examples did you use and can you underline them for me?”, “can you add more examples?”, or “are these examples pertinent/representative enough?”, “what kind of a relationship is there between your points?”, “in other words, did you somehow link your points?”, “do you have enough body paragraphs?”, “does your conclusion function as it should?”, “that is to say, does it sum up what you said above?”, “does it introduce any new points?”, “if so, why here?” and so on. The second stage of the tutorial focuses on language use issues. So, only after the overall discussion of global issues do we start talking about word choice, grammar use, punctuation and stylistics in the few remaining moments. So far, the tutorial I have described is very similar to a WC tutorial with native speaker (NS) writers. However, in addition to the non-directive, descriptive and inquiry-based method characteristic of writing center tutorials with NS writers, depending on the level of the student (beginner, intermediate or advanced), we get into a rather directive discussion along with these questions I have mentioned with our ESL writers. Differences between Turkish and English Rhetoric: What I’m about to say about this issue is entirely based on my observations and experiences in the writing center as well as in the writing classroom, and not on any kind of formal study. The more important emphasis we place in the tutorial is almost always the structure, and development of ideas and their expression since our students come from a rhetorical tradition and high school education that is radically different from the conventions of writing in English. For instance, they apparently learn that they are expected to make an introduction with a sweeping generalization and usually state the thesis late and indirectly. Also they are trained to withhold opinion and judgment until the conclusion or altogether. So, it is imperative to help them refrain from most of these strategies when it comes to writing in English. I believe total immersion is inevitable in order to become a successful writer in a specific discourse community without passing judgment on L1 strategies and their inherent qualities either way. It seems in Turkish we are somehow trained to write in long sentences, flashy, flowery or bombastic words, verbose expressions, and hyperbole, sweeping generalizations without any substantiation or support, avoidance of the first person singular point of view at all costs, instead, using general pronouns like ‘one’, ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘human beings’, or even ‘mankind’ appearing as alternative voices. They all transfer into our students’ essays. Also, even though I do not know how much of a transfer happens here, perhaps in line with the broad generalizations and stereotyping common in Turkish compositions, introductions open with a historic event in the distant past. The French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution are special favorites. (For instance, in an essay where the body is about the advantages and disadvantages of cell phones, or hazards of credit cards, or pros and cons waiting working mothers, you can easily come across an opening remark about the Industrial Revolution and wonder what is going on and how in the scope of a one-page essay (that is our average length) he or she is ever going to get to the point. Then there is the infamous conclusion, of course. There is a certain tendency to end the essay with a bang so to speak by making a striking comment that has nothing to do with the rest of the writing. It can appear in the form of a proverb, a pseudo-solution or good-will wishes like “a young tree is easy to bend” (this is a literal translation—it means young minds are impressionable and open to new things, so young people learn better), “the government should do something about it”, or to the same effect, “immediate measures must be taken”, and lastly something like “we should respect each other”, or “love and cherish one another”. The examples can sometimes pose a problem, too. They can be too vague as not to count as an example or too specific and long like talking about the brother’s painful experiences in one whole paragraph when the topic is whether the military service should be obligatory or not. Also an indifference to pronoun coherence in the same paragraph and even sometimes in the same sentence seems to lead to confusion. And lastly, I’d like to mention a general lack of cohesion that may be stemming from free association style students are so fond of. (again probably because of a lack of planning and revision habits). Since students do not have a real chance of total immersion in the English discourse community, common language transfer errors occur all the time. Idioms, metaphors and sometimes even common expressions are all translated from L1 to L2. In other words, they think in Turkish and try to translate it literally before both speaking and writing which has rather disastrous results. I tell them, oddly enough, I still mostly understand what they mean since I’m Turkish and can decipher what goes on in their minds, but that there is no way a native speaker of English can possibly guess what they are trying to say. On the one hand, it is certainly an advantage to have the fresh perspective of a non-native speaker (NNS) writer, totally unaware of the L2’s conventions, idioms, metaphors and old metaphors, that is cliches. They may make an authentic, refreshing contribution to the L2. However, sometimes they go overboard. “Please rephrase this since it really smacks of Turkish” is a stock phrase of English teachers and tutors working in a Turkish university setting. Sometimes, it really ‘reeks’ of Turkish and it starts to interfere with meaning/communication. Then we feel obliged to become ‘politically incorrect’ and censor students’ ‘written accents’. On top of all these differences in ways of thinking and written expression between Turkish and English, we are up against an ideological resistance to and resentment against English as the medium of instruction in higher education as Prof Ustun Erguder, our former director and rector also mentioned in his talk. As the descendants of a people and land that have never been colonized and never experienced the trauma of colonization (and therefore never produced a post-colonial literature), we have major issues with globalization, westernization and the ensuing identity crisis between being an easterner or oriental and being a part of Europe. The massive westernization efforts since Tanzimat has generated a harsh resentment as it is perceived being part of a not-so-covert colonization project, a threat to our sovereignty. This is all observed in students’ writing and in class discussions as well. Critical thinking, reading and writing: We, as writing center tutors and as writing teachers (these two identities are inseparable in our case, so I’ll keep mentioning the two experiences almost interchangeably), need to address all sorts of components in writing such as summarizing, paraphrasing, parts of an essay,introduction, body and conclusion as well as using and citing sources in research writing. However, doing so always requires teaching and tutoring critical thinking and writing. Critical thinking skills are rather hard to teach, though as I’m sure you all know. Similar to William Perry’s scheme of cognitive development, Turkish university students in prep schools demonstrate some basic intellectual and ethical positions. The most basic cognitive position they have in their prep or freshman year is the binary modes of thinking or dualistic thinking. That is to say, they perceive the world in terms of right or wrong, true or false, and good or bad. There is only one correct answer to a problem. In this framework of absolutes, instilled since their childhood through a pursuit for the ‘good, beautiful, and true/right’ (iyi, guzel ve dogru), and therefore very difficult to deconstruct, teachers and tutors are seen as the authority figures with a role of imparting the truth while the students are eager albeit empty receptacles/vessels to be filled with knowledge. So, most students believe that if they listen to the teacher’s instructions carefully and study hard, they can discover and get initiated into the mysterious and mystifying world of ideas and knowledge that constitute academia, or if not, at least get a decent grade. Due to the overall lack of problematization as a way of teaching critical thinking and writing in our education system, it takes longer for students to climb up the ladder of cognitive development envisioned by scholars like William Perry (1970, Harvard University) and James Moffett (Teaching the Universe of Discourse, 1987). This important gap is both the cause and in a way the effect of the systematic depoliticization campaign on young generations since the early 1980s and the last military intervention which immensely inhibited free speech and self-expression for the 80’s generation and beyond. I don’t think we have fully recovered yet from its trauma or the deliberate ideological censorship it established within the entire education system as well as the society at large, as Pinar Kur also briefly mentioned in her talk. Therefore, our primary task as tutors and teachers concerning critical thinking and writing is to get students to learn to pose questions to us, to themselves and to the world around them and thus help raise their critical awareness as a writer. Through an extensive exposure to good reading texts in a classroom setting interwoven with critical, analytical writing tasks, on which my colleague Aylin Unaldi will shortly talk in more detail, conducive to critical reading and analysis also help facilitate the transitional cognitive position students go through, that is a plurality of perspectives. This can be facilitated dialectically during the tutorials and in writing classes through a constant questioning, playing the devil’s advocate or shocking them into a critical awareness at the risk of being perceived as an incorrigible cynic and a skeptic. That way, being smart kids, they quickly discover that there are so many sides to the issue at hand that they never thought about or did not even consider possible. As they come from a conservative/traditional society, they have a set of taboos/deeply-set inhibitions, so a head-on challenge of these uncritically adopted values in a university setting usually becomes an eye-opening experience, especially on argumentative issues related to, for instance, pornography, prostitution, gay marriages, animal research, euthanasia, the death penalty, freedom of speech and so on. They leave the center or the classroom, to borrow W.B.Yeats’ phrase, full of ‘passionate intensity’, to google the topic or read a book or two in the library which fills me with a sense of immense achievement! Going back to J. Moffett and his universe of discourse, to transfer this dialogic and dialectic method of reading and writing instruction, and in particular, argumentation instruction, a hierarchy of writing tasks is used. And maybe because most textbooks are arranged around such a hierarchy, we do not reflect much upon it and take it for granted and sometimes even doubt its usefulness or effectiveness (on Saturday, in one of the conference sessions, one of the participants said she found description rather boring and unnecessary, for instance), but we must not forget that the simpler forms of writing must be taught and internalized before more complex academic writing tasks can be tackled. Personal narrative, description, process, classification, definition, comparison-contrast, cause/effect are all necessary rungs up the cognitive bi-directional ladder developing and constantly integrating these types of writing culminating in argumentation and reasoning and knowledge-making through research. Also simple skills like summarizing and paraphrasing should not be overlooked, because their simple nature can be misleading. Especially in attempting to teach critical reading, we come across many instances of students’ total inability to summarize the text they just read which is a clear indication of lack of comprehension despite the almost automatic and correct response rate regarding the questions following the text. Breaking down a text into paragraphs or sentences for analytical purposes is absolutely necessary in order to deconstruct several levels of metaphoric, metonymic, connotative, symbolic, ironic, etymologic meanings so that we can reconstruct it together. Or again, when they can summarize, it may often be incorrect or incomplete. Also, especially with paraphrases, there are acceptable and unacceptable versions. Students need as a lot of practice before they can internalize these basic but very essential skills. Since argumentation and reasoning involved is considered as the most difficult and complicated of all writing tasks, it needs more time and attention devoted to it. However, argumentation also contains at least two or more of the simpler forms of writing in the hierarchy that I mentioned. Also, the jump from one type and mode of writing to the other, especially from personal forms of writing to academic and impersonal ones constitutes one of the central concerns for us. The use of personal writing portfolios is part of our curriculum at the beginning of the year and by the end of the year we expect the students to have successfully made that jump, bridged that gap by producing cogent arguments. How much we accomplish that is of course debatable. The process approach (Peter Elbow, Donald Murray) and cognitive-developmental approach (George Hillocks) are also merged in the design of our writing assignments and classroom tasks. This is important to mention since our writing curriculum design affects our tutorials directly. On a final note, I’d like to mention that in one of the talks in the conference, I heard a presenter say repeatedly and I quote: “it is disturbing, troubling, depressing, and discouraging” that when left to their devices, “students want to write about what personally matters to them or topics they already know about like daily life, relationships, emotions, pop culture” and so on. I do not see what is troubling or disturbing about that. We always complain about motivation or the lack thereof. And when students feel enthusiastic about writing on a topic that that is relevant to them, a topic that they can relate to, we become discouraged. I do not agree. Let them write about whatever interests them. It may not be academic but still it is a good starting point since it is writing and writing done with at least some interest and self-regulation, to borrow Mary Ann Rafoth’s term. Also, you gotta take what comes your way. In the earlier session this morning, the business person presenter mentioned the popularity of several of the Internet sources especially among young people like writing.com, myspace.com, and blogs. Let’s not forget skype, msn, chat rooms and e-books. A different kind of literacy is being created, because the need for self-expression is universal. They may be bored in regular writing classrooms with regular writing tasks but these new directions/trends cannot or should not be ignored. It is up to us to moderate that writing into more academic, argumentative forms by helping the student problematize the contents of that personal writing, find questions to make the jump to higher planes of thinking.