Specific activities can be used as stand-alone training events (e.g., a staff meeting) or as part of an ongoing training program. They can serve simultaneously as professional
development for tutors and as diagnostic tools for directors. For instance, an observation activity (Comparing Tutorial Video with Sample Paper) can help clarify that a problem (L2 writers always ask for grammar help) has an additional facet (tutor complicity) that is invisible to tutors. By completing the activity, the tutors learn to be more aware of relationships between what they say they will do and what they actually do, and directors learn that the solution to the problem may not be as straightforward as it seems.
Generally speaking, activities involve interactive content. In a tutorial setting, there are three basic options for interaction: tutor, writer, document. As any of these can cause problems in a tutorial with an L2 writer (e.g., lack of tutor knowledge; writer with cultural expectations about tutor equaling teacher; or document that has been translated with an electronic translator), all of them are useful areas of focus. My general method for creating a new activity includes three steps: observe, research, think.
Step One—Observation
We do not train tutors in a vacuum, nor do we do so merely to occupy time. The first step toward creating a successful, valuable activity is to observe extensively. Rather than guess what tutors need, or assume it based on what other writing centers say, observe tutorials. Talk to tutors about their tutorials. Pay attention to interactions throughout the writing center. Being aware of what occurs in tutorials (and in tutors’ minds) will help with identifying an area of need (or, realistically, several areas of need).
Questions to Ask:
• What are the tutors struggling with? • Do they realize it is a struggle or not?
• What assumptions do they seem to be making?
• What disconnects are occurring between tutor and writer? • What knowledge or skill could help tutors with the issue? Step Two—Research
We do not train tutors in a vacuum; research continually brings to light new insights into tutoring and L2 writing. Section Three offers some direction for where to begin a search for materials, although since new material is continually being presented and published, it should be used as a starting point only. Once an area of tutor concern has been identified, the next step involves making connections with the larger writing center field, identifying what current research has to say about the area of struggle or about the way other institutions have been handling similar situations. Remember that the “larger field” includes not only writing center work but also second language studies, composition, education, and other disciplines as well. Questions to Ask:
• What does the larger field say about this area of struggle?
• Have other writing centers faced similar difficulties? If so, how have staff there dealt with the problem? What sort of professional development have they offered to ameliorate the situation?
• What important theoretical work exists on which to base activities?
• Will tutors already be familiar with the theoretical work, or will they need a bridge from other existing knowledge to the new knowledge?
• What will they need to read to gain the most benefit from the activity? What readings complement the activity?
Step Three—Thought
We do not train tutors in a vacuum; activities should exist in the gap between where tutors are and where they need to go. It requires careful thought to take knowledge of the
problem and knowledge of potential solutions and to develop activities that work within the local context and for the local tutors. Seeking to increase tutor awareness of their own assumptions, for instance, requires that one see both what people might be assuming and also how to make that assumption visible to them.
Questions to Ask:
• What do tutors already know? What do they need to know? • What might they be assuming?
• What is the desired outcome? (For instance, rather than having tutors simply observe a tutorial, have them observe something specific—who talks the most, the type of questions the tutor uses, the nonverbal language, etc.)
• What materials will work best for the desired outcome? (For instance, if the desired outcome relates to nonverbal language, tutorial observation will work better than examination of a document.) Is access to that material readily available?
• How much of the theoretical material should tutors be introduced to in order for this activity to work?
• What sort of post-activity reflection or other follow-up will help tutors to consolidate what they have learned?
Criteria
There are any number of criteria to consider while developing a training activity. These range from considerations of physical aspects such as space and time to pedagogical aspects such as outcomes and goals. Used mid-way through development or after the fact, such criteria serve an evaluative purpose (e.g., can tutors actually complete the developed activity within the
proposed time-frame?). At the start of the development cycle, they can provide both direction to the development (e.g., How can I turn what tutors propose as beneficial into an activity?) and boundaries for it (e.g., What materials are available to work with as I think about the outcome I am trying to achieve?). The list here provides a starting point for the types of criteria that can be beneficial to activity-development.
Questions to Ask:
• Can the activity be completed within the constraints of time, space, and material
availability? (See the Cautionary Tales for some examples of the importance of checking an activity for feasibility.)
• Does the activity lead to the desired outcome? As the Cautionary Tales show, sometimes the results of a test run will be surprising. This can be a good thing or a bad thing,
depending on the nature of the surprise. Either try a new activity first with a limited number of tutors, or evaluate it generally before offering it a second time.
• Do the tutors find it valuable? Does anyone comment on having used what they learned in an actual tutorial?
• Is it sustainable? Since writing centers experience tutor turn-over from year to year, developing activities that can be used in subsequent years (especially if some tutors are returning and some are new) can be helpful.
Using Multiple Information Sources to Create/Modify Activities
This section demonstrates how multiple sources of information may be used to create or modify activities. Many L2 writers ask for help with grammar; many tutors express discomfort in one form or another about this situation. A focus on grammar in some fashion may thus be expected to occur in a training program. Grammar as a topic is not completely straightforward; depending on the source of information, a tutor’s needs with respect to grammar—and thus the focus of the resulting activity—might vary from skill with correcting and explaining grammatical errors to knowledge about L2 writers’ familiarity with rhetorical terminology. It is not enough to decide “tutors need help with grammar” and thus to provide them with grammar lessons. The following material clarifies how different sources of information might yield different
understandings of a tutor’s need with respect to grammar.
• Tutorial Observations—A common session might look like this. An L1 tutor sits down with an L2 writer and asks what the writer wants to work on. “Grammar,” says the writer. “I need help with grammar.” The tutor agrees they can work on that, and the tutorial progresses with reading aloud, stopping to discuss individual sentences and words, and perhaps a mini-lesson. There may or may not be anything wrong with how the tutor handles the topic; the tutor may teach the writer strategies, scaffold the writer’s learning, and conduct the tutorial in a manner that allows the writer to learn as well as the paper to be improved.
Shortly before the end of the session, the tutor asks whether there is anything else the writer wants to work on. “Flow,” says the writer. “I don’t know if the paper flows all right.” The ubiquitous (among undergrad writers, anyway) flow may mean the logic of the argument, the organization of the content, the connections
between sentences. Regardless of which the writer means (or what the paper might actually need), five minutes is not enough time to adequately address any of them, but all of them were probably more important than grammar.
• Program Evaluations—Common tutor comments about the training program itself include items like these: “It would be interesting to see more of a discussion on some of the grammar or writing problems that students that speak an
individual language face.” “I usually ask if there is anything specific the client wishes to work on, and more often than not, it is not grammar, but something they thought was related to grammar like sentence flow.” “Perhaps cover grammatical issues more in depth earlier on in the training.” Note the range of opinion on the topic of grammar—cover more in the training; cover it earlier in the training; differentiate between L1 grammars; writers sometimes use the term for other things than true grammatical errors.
• Needs Analysis—Over a few years in the Writing Lab, the percentages of tutors who thought they lacked knowledge of grammar problems specific to L2 writers ranged from a low of 17% to a high of 56%.
• Tutor Commentary—In training-required blog postings, tutors revisit their starting point as tutors. Many of them refer specifically to grammar. Tutors indicated they struggled with grammatical knowledge (“As a first time tutor, I worried about being able to answer specific, complex questions about grammar or
providing detailed rules.” Jason); with engaging writers in the process rather than just editing for them (“I also worried about getting international students to recognize patterns of errors in their writing rather than going through each
sentence to fix the grammar for them.” Sue); with sorting out how a writer was using the term grammar (“In my limited experience, I had quickly learned that a student's request for help with ‘grammar’ was often a catch-all for any number of high or low order concerns, and that it was my responsibility to help a student ‘unpack’ what their needs really were.” Alan); and with both time and writer resistance to non-grammar help (“As a new tutor, I was concerned with seeing international students with lots of grammar issues that overwhelmed their papers and how I would be able to explain how to find and fix these grammar issues in a short tutorial. I was worried about students asking for grammar who needed help with global issues first and who may be unwilling to work on those or hear about those.” Brianna).
As these various sources of information show, tutors might need any of the following types of “grammar” help: information about what a request for grammar help might mean (beyond simply error); information about grammatical transference from various L1s; information about grammar problems of L2 writers generally; skill with identifying, correcting, and explaining specific grammatical problems; strategies for engaging writers in the process rather than just editing for them; and strategies for working with a writer who is resistant to non-grammatical help.
The type of activity that might be developed in response to tutors’ needs for “grammar” will vary widely depending on which focus takes priority. Interviews with writers might clarify how they use various terms to request help. Readings might elucidate the grammar problems of L2 writers generally as well as the transference problems for specific L1s. Practice with sample papers might improve skill with identifying or correcting specific errors, while reading about
those errors in writing handbooks might help with explaining the corrections. Offering a diverse group of tutors a single grammar activity, then, will be less useful than offering a number of carefully-focused grammar activities. Both needs analyses and program evaluations can provide a means of focusing broader topics (e.g., grammar) such that the activities developed meet very specific needs related to those topics.
Ongoing evaluations also enable existing activities to be modified as needed. For instance, a sample paper exercise that asks tutors to identify and correct grammar errors can be modified to ask them to also locate instances where writers correctly used grammatical
constructions which they had previously misused. The original activity focuses on tutors’ abilities with identifying and correcting grammar; the modified activity shifts the focus so that tutors must consider the writers’ skills with grammar rather than the grammar itself. The original version might be useful for tutors who were (or who felt they were) lacking grammar knowledge or skill. The modified version might be useful for tutors who had a tendency to focus on errors to the exclusion of all else. If a writer both misuses and correctly uses a certain grammatical construction in the same paper, a tutor might address the error in a different way (e.g., simply as a mistake, asking the writer to compare the correct and incorrect versions); tutors who are blind to what a writer does correctly at the sentence level will be unable to move beyond the mini grammar-lesson model of working at the sentence level. The writers’ papers may improve, but the writers themselves will not have had the opportunity to improve their own skills related to the grammatical constructions in question.