By Shannon Stephens
In the second meeting of the writing group I am running this semester, I got up to make copies and something very interesting happened. The group was getting off to a bumpy start: three people had officially signed up but only two had come to the meeting, there was some confusion regarding what exactly a writing group was (when I got up to make copies, I was in the middle of explaining that while this was not meant to be a lesson or a group consultation, it was an opportunity for them to connect with other business writers and learn from each other), and we were mid-negotiation about what, exactly, we wanted to cover for the rest of the semester.
Almost as soon as I left the table, the participants turned to each other and began chatting in their shared native language. Although I didn’t have access to what they were saying to each other, it seemed to be a very productive conversation: they were bent over the model case study one of them had brought in, and appeared to be explaining different sections to each other—or, at least, commiserating about the questions they had.
Standing by the copier, I was left feeling a little conflicted. My reading about writing group facilitation had helped me frame the belief that any writing group has two core goals: one, to help participants gain a better sense of their shared genre and two, to create a space where students engage in collaborative learning with other writers who have similar goals. These participants were knocking goal #2 out of the park – they were using each other as resources without any prompting or facilitation from me. I wondered, however, how well a conversation in their native language would serve goal #1. If their aim was to master case study writing in English, shouldn’t they be talking about case studies in English?
When I rejoined the table, the participants immediately stopped talking to each other, and switched to English to address me. Even their body language changed: where before, they had been hunched together over a piece of writing, they now turned away from each other, towards me. I wasn’t sure how to point out that by the looks of it, they already had been learning and my presence was, more than anything else, an interruption.
We continued the meeting in English, and it occurred to me that for this group, the presence of an English-speaking “expert” was posing a problem. Although they were able to communicate with authority in their native language, each participant’s English fluency was such that they needed me as an interlocutor to assist with meaning-making. This dynamic can be fruitful in many contexts, particularly in one-to-one consultations; in the writing group, however, it meant that they struggled to rely on each other instead of just on me.
I left the meeting believing that, while it is critically important to use English when discussing the role of language in American business writing, that these writers could – and should – use each other to understand the expectations of an assignment in whatever language was most comfortable to them.
I am still working on strategies for facilitating a writing group that partly utilizes a language I have no competency with. However, Deepti provided me with some good ideas for how to use translanguaging strategies in a writing group context. The core principle here is that a writer’s native language can be used as a resource, and that one of my roles as the group’s facilitator should be to help writers feel comfortable relying on their native language for certain purposes.
For example, I can make room in a meeting for participants to identify the key moves of a model text in their native language, and then have them work together to explain those moves to me in English. I can also encourage them to brainstorm in English and their native language, and encourage comparison between the expectations of business writing in their home country with expectations here.
Ultimately, I have learned that a facilitator working with multilingual students should frame writers’ shared language as a strength they can use to help each other, and as an entrance to the goal of collaborative learning in a writing group context.
Published October 29, 2015
