Blog 11

Drafty writing for Presentation and Analysis section section.

Presentation:

     Student comes into the center and states that she has an appointment, signs in at the front desk, and then follows the coach to the back of the center where they then sit down and begin their session.
     The student states that she is an Management major and that this paper she wishes to work on is one for her International Business class. The coach asks what year she is in at the University and the students responds that she is in her Senior year. She also indicated that this was her first visit to the Writing Center. Judging by the way the student was speaking and responding to the coach, I was able to surmise that she was an ESL student. The coach asks what she would like help in and the student begins to explain that English has never been her strong suit and that she was constantly having difficulty with grammatical errors, more specifically, her articles and word tenses.
     The student did not have an actual paper to work on but she had a physical copy of an outline that needed to be submitted and she wanted to go over it with the coach to fix any potential issues with articles and tenses. The coach explained that they could read over the paper together, while the student read it out loud, and that if she (the coach) saw anything that needed fixing, she would help her. The student agreed to the plan and they began reading over the outline.
     While they were reading the introduction to the outline, the coach stopped the student and suggested to clarify a specific sentence, as the coach had had some trouble following it entirely. The coach asked, "Whats one way you can write this sentence to make it more clear?" Although the student was speaking in a very faint tone and I was not able to hear exactly what was said, the student did suggest a potential revision and the coach immediately agreed to it. The student was about to go on with the reading of the outline and the coach suggested that she write it down to make sure she did not forget to make the change later. The student does so and the session continues. As they read, the coach stops the student every now and then to mention more specific alterations, such as different word usage or sentence structure. The coach also worked on the issue of missing articles by telling the student whenever there was one missing. The student would be reading a sentence and the coach would stop her and say, for example, "There should be an 'a' there" or "Just put a 'the' right there."
     At one point, there was an issue with the tense of a specific word and the coach asked, "What's another word that sounds like 'compare'? How can we change it to the right tense?" The student thought over it for a few moments then suggested, "Comparing?" To which the coach replied, "What about comparison?"The student simply nodded her head and wrote it down on the paper.
   The remainder of the session was spent going over more small article corrections. The outline had been totally read through, the student thanked her, and then left.

Data:

     The coach more often than not made direct suggestions for alterations to the outline rather than using open-ended questions to try and help let the student get to the answer herself. When open-ended questions were used, however, the student was able to think on the issue, and make suggestions that often got her closer to the correct answer herself with a bit more coaxing from the coach. Throughout the entire session, the coach was very polite and never spoke as though she were an authority figure but it was most certainly implied due to the fact that many times, she was simply telling the student how to change the paper. Most of the revisions that needed to be done were small grammatical ones so there was not a huge opportunity to repeatedly use open-ended questions and for the student to maintain their "voice" (because their voice was never in question to begin with), however, the coach rarely tried to see whether or not the student would be able to recognize their own mistakes later on through the paper after having found several between them. When the coach asked about the tense of the word "compare," even though she was looking for a specific response, it was still closer to asking an open-ended question rather than just telling her how to change the word outright.