Multilingual Writers and Writing Centers

Ben Rafoth

• Editorial: Utah State University Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780874219647
• Categoría: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoría: Linguistics

Multilingual writers—often graduate students with more content knowledge and broader cultural experience than a monolingual tuto—unbalance the typical tutor/client relationship and pose a unique challenge for the writing center. Multilingual Writers and Writing Centers explores how directors and tutors can better prepare for the growing number of one-to-one conferences with these multilingual writers they will increasingly encounter in the future.

This much-needed addition of second language acquisition (SLA) research and teaching to the literature of writing center pedagogy draws from SLA literature; a body of interviews Rafoth conducted with writing center directors, students, and tutors, and his own decades of experience. Well-grounded in daily writing center practice, the author addresses which concepts and practices directors can borrow from the field of SLA to help tutors respond to the needs of multilingual writers, what directors need to know about these concepts and practices, and how tutoring might change in response to changes in student populations. Multilingual Writers and Writing Centers is a call to invigorate the preparation of tutors and directors for the negotiation of the complexities of multilingual and multicultural communication.

1
The Changing Faces of Writing Centers

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From the time they were laboratories in the first half of the last century until today, one hundred years later, writing centers have evolved with higher education generally and the teaching of writing in particular. Writing centers have been around a long time and have made a difference in the lives of many students. Today, the face of writing centers is changing along with the worldwide expansion of educational opportunities. The foundation of writing center pedagogy—one-to-one instruction—is still a critical asset in the writing curriculum, but it is also labor—and intellectually—intensive, meaning that there are not enough well-qualified tutors to meet students’ needs. Growing numbers of students from around the world turn to writing centers to learn to write in their native languages and in English, and at advanced levels. They seek degrees that will usher them and their families into the modern economy and secure their futures with good education and rewarding careers. Writing program administrators seek the same thing for themselves, in fact. Chris Thaiss et al. (2012) observe that “the drive to become literate and, therefore, to teach literacy, usually in advanced forms, is sparked in almost every case by student and staff desires for academic recognition in the international research community or by desire for career success in the global economy” (9). People everywhere want many of the same things.

Education and jobs are intertwined with a host of other motivations. Among the students I interviewed, the desire to be good citizens, partners, and family members as well as to find happiness all had personal roots tied to education and careers. These are the life goals for millions of people abroad and in the United States who pursue dreams at great cost to themselves and their loved ones. In rural China, for instance, according to an article in the New York Times (Bradsher, Feb. 17, 2013), families make sacrifices to sponsor college attendance for one or more of their members on incomes that average around $5,000 a year. The report calculates the annual cost of higher education at a Chinese university for a rural family to be between six and fifteen months’ labor. For a Chinese family to send a member to college in the United States can cost not only a lifetime’s worth of savings but much of their income while the child is growing up—for boarding schools, special tutors, and language classes. Moreover, proficiency in English is not just a requirement for getting into schools in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, and other popular destinations—it is also needed for admission to most good Chinese universities. Given how intent so many students are on learning advanced English, are today’s writing centers ready for them?

More Writing, More Writing Centers

Families around the globe are helping to escalate college enrollments that are changing the face of higher education worldwide. In the growth economies of Asia, Brazil, India, and China, new university campuses are springing up in record time and established ones can barely expand fast enough to meet demand. College enrollments worldwide are expected to grow by twenty-one million students by 2020 according to a study conducted for the British Council (Sharma, University World News, March 13, 2012). This represents a huge rise in overall numbers and an average growth rate of 1.4 percent per year. China, India, and the United States will continue to see increases, while the fastest growth is expected to occur in Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, and Nigeria. The study projects that the largest higher education systems will likely be China with thirty-seven million students, India with twenty-eight million, the United States with twenty million, and Brazil with nine million. Elsewhere, Mexico has opened seventy-five new colleges and universities since 2006 (Lloyd 2010). In Saudi Arabia, thirty-five new colleges and universities have opened since 2000. India plans to double the number of students enrolled in higher education and open about 200 new universities in the next five years (Chauhan, Hindustan Times, April 25, 2012).

For US higher education, this rise in student numbers means continued growth in the population of international students as increasing prosperity overseas creates opportunities for travel, immigration, study abroad, and graduate education, with the United States being a preferred destination. For writing centers, this growth means more multilingual and multicompetent writers (Cook 1999) for whom English is but one resource in their communicative repertoire. A tutor’s knowledge of another language is valuable not only for the cultural insights it gives them but also for the shared experience of language learning and figuring out how to overcome communication obstacles. Learning a new language builds pedagogical skills most monolingual writers take for granted. People who live and work among multiple languages acquire skills for gauging when and how to move between languages, and they learn a greater variety of the expectations people have for different kinds of conversational interaction. According to Canagarajah (2006a), multilingual students no longer see themselves as located within one language or another but as shuttling between languages to achieve their diverse goals for communication.

For today’s NNES students, these goals will continue to include control over the academic discourses of English. To achieve this control, though, they will use all the resources available to them, including tutors, teachers, peers, family members, online translators, textual borrowing, and downloadable apps. Writing centers will still be a tool for gaining advanced literacy and a place where tutors help students, in one-to-one conferences, to express their thoughts. But instead of language proficiency, says Canagarajah (2009), in the future “the versatility with which we can do things with words” (20) will matter most. And while English may remain dominant, the advantage that multicompetent, multilingual users have over monolinguals will only increase.

This advantage is apparent in multilingual tutoring sessions. Miguel, a tutor at Bronx Community College who is bilingual in Spanish and English, described for me a difficult session he had not long ago that started out in English. The writer was a female history major. “She pushed me to answer all her questions and didn’t want to think things through,” he said. “She became very agitated.” So, Miguel switched to Spanish and they continued to talk for a while. “She was very anxious when we talked in English,” he said, “but in Spanish, she calmed down. Spanish created comfort for her.” I asked him how he knew when to switch back to English, and he said, “When the student reads the assignment and we see concepts—these have to be understood. That, we do in English.” He added, “Being sympathetic to the language of students helps. It says you recognize, ‘I am dealing with two languages here. It’s real. It’s hard.’”

In the United States today, most enrollment increases in higher education come not from domestic but from international students, and it is easy to see why they and other multilingual students like Miguel are becoming writing center tutors. According to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education (McMurtrie 2012), the number of international students grew faster in 2011 than it did in the previous two years. Saudi students have enrolled at record levels, up by 50 percent in recent years and now numbering well over forty thousand, due in part to scholarship support by the government. Growth was especially strong in programs offering the bachelor’s degree and those offering English-language instruction. According to figures generated by NAFSA: Association of International Educators, international students and their dependents contributed $21.8 billion to the American economy in tuition and living expenses. These numbers are likely to rise as more international students are welcomed into the country. In 2012, for example, President Obama promised an increase in the number of student visas from Latin America and the Caribbean from sixty-four thousand to one hundred thousand. Issuing visas is only the first step toward an education, however. According to an administrator for international programs at the University of Kansas, “As they increase international enrollments, [colleges] need to bolster the services surrounding them, from English-language classes to academic advising to extracurricular activities. We can’t be bringing students here to fail” (McMurtrie 2012).

Along with the growth of higher education around the world and in the United States have come organizations for networking and professional development: the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW), the International Society for the Advancement of Writing Research, the International Research Foundation for English Language Education (TIRF), the International WAC/WID Mapping Project, and the newest affiliates of the International Writing Centers Association—the European Writing Centers Association (EWCA) and the Middle East-North Africa Writing Centers Alliance (MENAWCA). In addition, there are untold numbers of local and regional affiliations of writing centers and writing programs. These organizations provide opportunities for directors’ professional development and new ways for them to educate tutors to help students learn to write in English and their native languages. As more organizations join in helping improve writing center tutors’ effectiveness and their clients’ writing, more resources will be available to expand writing center values even further.

Writing Center Snapshots Here and Abroad

Thaiss et al. (2012) have provided a sense of the diversity of writing programs and writing centers around the world, as well as the ways those writing centers have organized literacy education in response to their cultures’ pedagogical traditions and students’ needs. The many programs and centers featured in their book explore structures outside their borders for teaching and learning. They show how these structures have arisen in response to the internationalizing of English-language teaching, especially for academic and professional purposes, and how the teaching of writing has been enhanced by the accessibility of Internet-based resources. Thaiss et al. (2012) offer at least four reasons that help explain the burgeoning interest these program have shown for exploring writing instruction: (1) the transnationality of education and the centrality of learning English, (2) the desire for advanced literacy, (3) the range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds among teachers and students, and (4) the influence of mass culture on the kinds of literacy education they seek (9).

One or more of these reasons now applies to almost every writing center, in the United States as well as overseas, because multilingualism has begun to define what it means to teach and learn in a writing center. To get a better feel for this diversity and the impact we can expect from it, we can look into the windows, so to speak, of a handful of writing centers around the world. Massey University spans three campuses in New Zealand. It has a greater percentage of Maori students than any other university on the island. About half of its thirty-four thousand students are enrolled in distance education. Political and economic dislocations from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s focused attention on nontraditional groups, especially those who were older and less affluent. For the first time, they were able to take advantage of programs to prepare for second careers and learn new skills. Indigenous people benefitted as well. To serve students unable to travel to campus, the university’s Online Writing and Learning Link was created to provide a library of resources (Emerson 2012).

In Istanbul, Turkey, Sabanci University has long supported efforts that promote international outreach. Its writing center has participated in various regional and international organizations, including NCTE and CCCC in the United States. “As we mix with others, we add to the international common core of knowledge, and we then bring back what we have observed and admired as differences, to be shared by others at home and implemented as much as the circumstances allow,” says Dilek Tokay, Sabanci’s former writing center director. Tokay herself served as chair of the 2005 European Writing Centers Association conference, and in 2010, the IWCA honored her for her many contributions to the organization (Tokay 2012).

Located in one of the most densely populated areas in the United States, Bronx Community College in New York draws students from one of the most diverse communities in the nation. The Bronx is proud of its diversity and boasts that if you were to randomly select any two people in the Bronx, there is an 89 percent chance they would belong to different racial or ethnic groups. More than two decades ago, Puerto Ricans made up a quarter of the population. The number of Dominicans, Cubans, Jamaicans, Koreans, Vietnamese, Indians, Pakistanis, Greeks, and Russians has climbed dramatically since then. Albanians settled in the Belmont area, Cambodians in Fordham. Luxury apartments built in Riverdale in the 1950s became cooperatives. The Bronx has the world’s largest concentration of buildings in the art deco style. Against this backdrop, the community college writing center is home to twenty-six tutors who speak Spanish, French, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, Bangla, Farsi, Turkish, Ewe (Ghana), Twi (Ghana), Patwa (north India), and Chichewa (Malawi). A majority of the students they serve is Hispanic, but the linguistic bouquet among the students is as varied as it is for the tutors. The BCC center is also one of the busiest in the country, with over seven thousand one-to-one tutoring sessions per year.

In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, three new writing centers have debuted, including the first writing center at an all-Muslim women’s university. The Princess Nora Bint Abdulrahman University Writing Center is unique because it was started by a midwesterner from the United States, Dr. Barbara Toth, and it ha...