Tutoring Second Language Writers

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Book: Read Tutoring Second Language Writers for Free Online
Authors: Shanti Bruce
whose own agenda, shared by many separatists, to rid themselves of any association with academic or linguistic assimilation or colonization, can overwhelm their teaching of writing” (340).
    In many ways, the spectrum described and stances/practices along that spectrum offered by Severino became helpful frameworks for us as we worked to understand the various approaches one might take in multilingual tutoring and what the implications might be for each approach. The case studies Severino offers in her essay as examples of both particular and blended approaches were especially useful to all of us. As we talked together, about both Severino’s article and the tutoring practices we had engaged or observed other tutors engaging in the UNL writing center, the tutors articulated concerns about the ways in which they and their fellow tutors seemed to be adopting one stance and using it unilaterally. Absent a theoretical framework that might enable tutorsto make discerning choices about which strategies to employ under what circumstances, the tutors observed that they tended always to land on or near assimilationism by default. They worried that the term separatism effectively warned them away from exploring with writers productive engagement with the blending of discourses within a single text, or code-meshing ( Young 2010 , 114). In order to make informed and pedagogically sound decisions about tutoring strategies, the tutors felt they needed to learn or to develop means of conceptualizing the relationship between systemic inequality, language difference, and their individual work with student writers.
    To create inclusive theoretical and pedagogical spaces/relations within communities of writers, writing center practitioners—especially monolingual tutors and administrators—will be well served, we concluded, by using categories like those delineated by Severino carefully and critically as starting points for reexamining attitudes about language and identity. In the UNL writing center, we hope, however, that those conversations will take up the limitations or reductiveness of complete subscription to any single approach even as more recent scholarship is examined. We believe in the importance of continuing to study the degree to which common assumptions and practices are mythologized even within the categories outlined above, underwritten within them rather than challenged by them.
    As we considered the mythologizing of various approaches to the teaching of writing, we were struck by Jennifer Grill’s insight that SWAE anxieties are rooted, in fact, in certain myths about the language itself. We note the degree to which such myths undergird what can seem like very ordinary, “commonsensical” sorts of conversations between tutors and writers. Jennifer Grill’s work from TESOL, for instance, lays out “Assumptions about Language” ( Grill 2010 , 359) that need to be reconsidered:
    Myth 1: Standard English is the Best and Most Correct Form of English.
    Myth 2: English Dialects Are Improper and Randomly Created Forms of the Language. [We would add that perceived linguistic “divergences” regarded as improper and randomly created forms of language is also a myth]
    Myth 3: Dialects Interfere with Learning “Proper” English and Should Not Be Used in the Classroom. [We would add that linguistic “divergences” as interference is also a myth; in fact, these “divergences” can help enrich a text]
    As they studied and talked together, the tutors began to recognize the ways and degrees to which these myths constituted our own writingcenter version of the (il)logics of the tweets published on the UNL haters blog and how buying into these myths helped perpetuate the “guest” status of multilingual writers and tutors. Collectively, we sought to continue to study the ways and degrees to which these myths may inform, albeit perhaps implicitly, our practice of working with multilingual writers. We all noted, with Severino,

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