What this handout is aboutWhen you ask students writing in English as an additional language what they would like to work on, they will often say that they’d like you to check their grammar. “Checking the grammar” can feel uncomfortably close to proofreading and editing students’ papers for them—which writing coaches know is strictly out of bounds. Unfortunately, multilingual writers have been unfairly denied access to language feedback because of the very strong prohibition against editing, but the good news is that we can still be very helpful without compromising our principles. Show
This page provides a bit of important historical context for the discussion and offers strategies for responding to the grammar-checking request in ways that respect the pedagogical philosophies of the writing center and the instructional needs of students writing in a foreign language. The list of strategies is followed by excerpts of coaching sessions, with annotations that illustrate how some of the strategies work in real conversations between writing coaches and multilingual writers. 1984: The triple whammy for multilingual writersIn 1984, several of the most influential texts in writing center history were published. You will probably recognize the first two because the vocabulary and the philosophy are still driving forces in today’s writing centers:
The writing process was divided, the writing center’s territory was firmly staked, and the perceived needs of multilingual writers were placed squarely outside the parameters of the writing center’s mission, pedagogical philosophy, and standard procedure. No wonder we’ve struggled so much! In fairness to the scholars above, they meant to emphasize that writers should concentrate on developing their ideas before they worried about comma splices, and to emphasize that truly good writing involved the long-term development of a complex set of skills. These ideas are still so powerfully present in writing centers today because they are so very true. Unfortunately, they had the unintended effect of marginalizing discussions of sentence structure, word choice, punctuation, and grammatical errors until very late in the writing process. In truth, ideas can not be separated from the language used to express them. Multilingual writers are advanced language learners who are working toward the command of a sophisticated range of vocabulary, sentence structures, discipline-specific expressions, idioms, etc. Multilingual writers are also developing writers, so they do need the same kind of process-oriented and “higher order” feedback that monolingual writers need. Quite often, though, their ability to develop the content of their essays is limited by a lack of vocabulary or by difficulty with complex sentence structures. As coaches, you can support the development of writing skills by talking about language at any point in the writing process where it might be helpful. It’s good to discourage premature concern with nit-picky editing decisions, but it’s great to encourage exploration of the right language for expressing a great idea. Be flexible and be comfortable with the fluid, back and forth movement between discussing the ideas and the language. What do you do when students say, “Just check my grammar”?
What if students really mean, “Just check my grammar”?There does come a time writers are ready to concentrate strictly on their grammar. They’re satisfied with everything else, and as writers, you know that’s a happy place to be. Normally we teach proofreading strategies to native speakers at this stage. We can do this with multilingual writers too, but we also have to adjust our strategies to accommodate their status as language learners. These suggestions are meant to help you with that adjustment. There’s a strong misconception that there will be “patterns of error”—certain types of errors that occur repeatedly in the text. Sometimes that does happen, but more frequently, there will only be one or two instances of twenty five different kinds of error. That’s okay. You can still exploit the educational value of an error, having confidence that students will try to apply what they learn to their subsequent writing. Two things to note: First, even though the strategies listed below concentrate more on straight proofreading and grammar checking, remember that you can also use all of the strategies listed above for correcting the grammar by clarifying the intended meaning. Second, when you do find an error, you can ask, “How do you normally proofread for this kind of mistake?” or say to the student, “Let’s try to find a few more examples of this structure, just to double-check them.” Look for correct and incorrect examples because we need our successes reinforced too! It’s a great opportunity to assess the student’s proofreading skills and do some strategy building. Think of these strategies as being listed in the order they should be used in, but feel comfortable to experiment with the order, depending on the student, the writing project, and your own judgment. Play with them to see how each strategy helps enhance the students’ learning experience.
The strategies in actionThese transcripts are excerpted from sessions with second language writers. They have been annotated to explain a bit about what was happening, what the students were trying to accomplish, what the coaches were trying to accomplish, and to illustrate a few of the concepts and strategies listed above. Read each excerpt without reading the comments, just to get the flow of the conversation. Read them again, looking at each of the marginal comments as you reflect on the information on this page. ResourcesSee our English Language Resources page for several learner’s dictionaries and other language learning resources and strategies. You can find very clear explanations of grammar structures and an EXCELLENT collection of idioms and phrasal verbs, which ESL students usually struggle with, at UsingEnglish.com. ReferencesFriedlander, A. (1984). Meeting the needs of foreign students in the writing center. In G. A. Olson (Ed.) Writing centers: Theory and administration (pp. 206-214). Urbana, IL: NCTE. North, S. (1984). The idea of a writing center. College English, 46, 433-446. Reigstad, T. J., & McAndrew, D. A. (1984). Training tutors for writing conferences. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Make a Gift What is a source that provides true accurate current unbiased and complete information?A credible source is free from bias and backed up with evidence. It is written by a trustworthy author or organization.
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