Blog Post #3: Lulu

In my first year of teaching, I had just two Chinese students across three courses. However, my Rhetoric course this summer was nearly 50% non-native speakers including six Chinese students. I wish that I'd read some of this week's resources before giving feedback on their written work, especially "Possible Transfer-Based Problems You Might Observe When Working With Chinese Students." I'm especially intrigued by the idea of "positive" transfer and have definitely noticed examples of positive transfer in student work.

Syntactic transfer-based problems are something I've definitely encountered in the Writing Center. Before reading about transfer-based problems, I wasn't aware that Chinese syntax was looser and doesn't require subordination and explicit connections. To me, the word-for-word rendering of a Chinese sentence into English seems like a logical way to write in another language, despite the lack of clarity that might emerge in translation.

Working with students to correct this kind of "negative" transfer has been one of my primary challenges when working with non-native speakers in the Writing Center and I'm curious what methods have worked for you all so far. Does it help to have students read sentences with syntax issues out loud? Should I acknowledge the difference between Chinese and American syntax? Is "syntax" a word that Chinese students would be familiar with? How do I explain exactly why the sentence is "wrong?"


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ian Post #5

Maybe this is an odd tangent to pursue as a blog response, but one aspect of Phillip's writing that I wish Brice had gone into further detail about (assuming she had access to the information) was WHY Phillip got a B- on his assignment. From what I read, Phillip's personal story sounded endlessly interesting, and I thought his decision to structure this tale of his life using the narrative tradition (the four-act structure) of his culture was ingenious/appropriate, a merging of historical form with modern content. So, even if the writing of Phillip's piece wasn't perfect (Brice notes his control over the piece wasn't universal), it sounds both entertaining and heartfelt, and what's more, conceptually ambitious. Basically, knowing nothing about the professor in question, but given the loose, informal-seeming tone of this project, and given Phillip's obvious enthusiasm for the project (he wrote 12 pages when only five were expected), I was really surprised to ...
Read more

Ian Post #9

I think it's important for WC staff to perform research because, as Bedford points out, WC tutors have to compel their students to improve their writing even when we don't always know how best to compel them. Further research will hopefully continue to clarify how best to tailor a session to every student's individual needs, but for now I feel swaths of information are still missing. I feel this particularly acutely with my PhD statistics student. I've talked about the difficulties of working with a student who is producing a type of writing that feels fundamentally different to the writing I normally work with (so, writing that revolves around mathematical formulas instead of language analysis), and I'd be interested to see research conducted on how to best serve the writing of mathematicians. Although I'm trying my best with this student, in my heart of hearts, I cannot believe that I am truly helping her "grow" as a writer - each week I think I'...
Read more

Warren #9

Q: How important do you think it is for writing center staff to pursue writing center research? Why? What sorts of research could we propose for IWCC? I feel it's important for writing center staff to pursue research because research can be beneficial for tutors (and sometimes students). It has the potential to help tutors understand new pedagogical approaches and strategies, and develop ways to improve a writing center, to name a few. One of the challenges in conducting this research, particularly for those who are fairly new to writing centers, is to come to understand what areas of research are relevant. On the one hand, this can be accomplished by comparing the scholarship on writing centers with one's own tutoring experiences. On the other hand, tutors may want to come to their own understanding first of how a writing center functions (or doesn't function), and then search for those issues in the scholarship to see if they've been addressed. In either scenario, I...
Read more