HOC, LOC, and ELL

            This semester I have been encountering two issues over and over again with tutees: lack of prewriting and ELL difficulties.

            A lack of prewriting is usually caused by a time crunch on the student’s part. They are expecting the session to cover low order concerns (LOC), such as sentence structure and citation formatting. What I’ve found over the course of the semester is that these students are often in need of much more higher order concern (HOC) help, especially in organization. What they’ve brought to the Writing Center is a sloppy first draft, and when a time crunch is involved, students often don’t want to hear that they have a lot more work ahead of them if they want this to be a great paper. My challenge as a tutor has been to honor both the HOC and time constraints of the student. What I have been doing pedagogically is to help the student make an outline for their paper. I assure them that they have their ideas, now they just need to be polished and ordered logically. Having something tangible to walk away with seems to make the tutee feel more at ease, and like they have a clear direction to take their paper in.

            My struggles with English Language Learners (ELL) has also been balancing HOC and LOC. Many ELL students want to focus on correcting their grammar, but often times lose focus on the actual content of their paper. In order to balance the agenda the tutee has set, and what HOCs I would like to focus on. Overall, having the student read his/her paper aloud has been the most successful. Most tutees have been able to self-identify a grammar mistake, and may only need me to model the correct grammatical structure once. After that, we are usually able to discuss the HOCs that I have noted during the reading.

            As my internship continues, I would like to find some other pedagogical techniques for working with ELL students, and some other multimodal strategies for prewriting.