By Titcha Ho
I am a pretty fast typist. I come from that old generation when you had to learn how to type first before you were allowed to touch a computer. The curriculum was perhaps built on the principle that female students might someday become secretaries. I also chat with my friends back in my country on a daily basis. For me, because I type fast, my typing speed mimics my speaking speed. To many multilingual writers like me, online chatting presents a great opportunity for communication. Rather than having to maneuver around perfecting an intelligible accent, Standard English spelling takes away the fear that people might not understand what I say.
Still, despite my fast typing skills and my familiarity with online chatting, as a writing consultant, I sometimes have online chat sessions that could have been more successful. In looking at the successful sessions, the following are considerations when working with multilingual students online:
1) Being curious— Similar to a counseling session, when you show that you are curious about what the other person is saying, that person is likely to share more. From the successful online chat sessions that I had, I used the techniques I learned as a qualitative research interviewer. I assume a role of a novice when I work with students. In doing so, I invite students to respond more in the chat line in order to provide me with more content. I often ask, “What else?” to solicit more answers and use the content that the students address to ask more questions.
2) Willingness to negotiate— Allowing students time and asking the right questions could help students arrive at what they want to write about. Raforth (2015) suggests that working with multilingual writers entails allowing the back and forth turn-taking for multilingual students to arrive at what they want to express. The process takes time and you may have to ask students repeatedly, “What do you mean by that?” You can also look at this process as employing a Socratic method with second language learners.
3) Building rapport—Confidence plays a significant role in one’s language proficiency. In one of my recent sessions, the student wrote in the chat line, “I’m really sorry. English is my third language.” Rather than brushing off the comment, I typed, “That’s awesome. You can speak so many languages.” Here, rather than looking at his language deficiency, I praised him for his language expertise. The session seemed to work well after that moment.
Of course, there have been some sessions where I feel that the online chat cannot quite communicate what the students want to say. If that is the case, it is always OK to suggest that they come to visit our wonderful writing center in person. Lastly, despite the fact that, as English writing teachers, we are gatekeepers of academic English—where emoticons have no place—inserting =) seems to really help my chat sessions.
Source:
Rafoth, B. (2015). Multilingual Writers and Writing Centers (first ed.). Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.
Published March 31, 2015
