By Deepti Dhir
During a professional development event this semester, two colleagues called my attention to an important question they had been investigating, “How do you figure out how much to offer the writer?” Often, a sense of worry that we’re giving the student “too much” sets in where we ask ourselves, “How much is too much?”
At times, we may even falsely believe that in offering a student what we consider to be “too much,” we make the writer more dependent.
As a first step toward revising an unclear idea, we may direct the student to get something down on the page without worrying about if it’s perfect or not, or we ask, “Can you talk more about X?” and then record what the student says. I like to directly probe the student with, “Can you try saying this another way?”
However, the result of one of the above moves is usually a sentence or two that is much clearer, but that still has some lingering word choice or phrasing concerns. At this point, particularly if the student does not speak English as their first language, it may not be as useful to direct the student to correct the sentence further on her own.
After the student has come up with an improved idea, I have found one of the following to be a useful second step towards further revision.
- Here’s how I commonly hear it:
Ex: “Given the fact that . . . ” instead of “Given to fact, . . . ” - Take your pick:
Ex: “Disney was able to make/earn/gain a profit . . . ” - Fill it in:
Ex: “Smith seems to suggest that ________”
The process of going from the student producing language to the consultant helping to frame it helps to strike a balance between using the student’s words and supplying corrections or changes. This process also relieves some of the tension around giving the student what we feel is too much language, since the student herself gets a chance to produce right off the bat before we jump in.
There are certainly a few others ways of scaffolding the writing of an English sentence. I would argue that the three outlined above work to foster a sense of independence in the writer. Very plainly, the student cannot encounter new vocabulary in a vacuum. They need quality input from proficient speakers before they can independently use new forms of the language.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about other ways of approaching sentence-level work that have proven to be useful in your practice.
Published May 20, 2016
