Introduction

As the ESL specialist in a university writing program, it was incumbent upon me to ensure that our ELL population received the best possible support. Part of this support came from our writing center tutors and writing course instructors, the majority of whom were graduate students in the English department. These tutors and teachers, while dedicated and linguistically talented, often had little experience with ELLs.

In a given year, I also taught two concurrent courses: a graduate TESOL composition pedagogy class, largely populated by the above-mentioned tutors and instructors, and an English-for-academic-purposes course for matriculated undergraduates who had been identified as needing extra language support.

It occurred to me that this was a teaching match made in heaven. I was working with two groups of learners that, essentially, needed to spend time with one another in order to achieve their goals. I wanted to facilitate an authentic, experiential learning environment that would be beneficial to all. In the sections below, I will describe (1) the interclass partnership program and graduate-undergraduate student pairs that I created, (2) specific course assignments and projects that partners helped one another complete, and, finally, (3) ideas for moving forward. Throughout, I will also discuss how this partnership functioned in accordance with our ESL program values and goals, which are the following:

• To support language and culture learning with experiential, task-based, authentic assignments

• To promote practices that foster independence and self-confidence, particularly for those who may not see themselves as authorities

• To provide opportunities for engagement with the campus community

The Partnership Program

The first aspect of the program that I wish to relate, in light of the ESL program philosophy described above, is my desire to avoid creating student-teacher pairs in which one partner (i.e., the graduate student) served as the authority and the other, a passive learner. Instead, I wanted to facilitate experiences in which both partners saw themselves as active participants who were helping each other complete course assignments and projects.

As I sat down at the beginning of the semester to flesh out the project, I revisited what I knew about these two groups. While dissimilar on the surface, the two sets of learners faced analogous challenges. Many of the pedagogy students who chose to take my course were unsure of their ability to work with ELLs and eager for theoretical and practical preparation. The freshman EAP students, already lacking confidence for having been placed in what they saw as a remedial course, were concerned about their academic English abilities. The main goal of the project became to provide practical, hands-on learning opportunities that also built confidence.

Classroom Problem Solving: Designing the Syllabus and Assignments With My Students

I wanted the students to feel a sense of relevance and ownership over the proposed partnership,soI began the semester by explaining the concept and asking the two classes what, should they agree to the idea, they envisioned it would entail. A specific question I asked the EAP class was “How can my group of teachers help you with the challenges you face in this course?” To my TESOL students, I asked: “In what ways could working with my class of ESL students help you attain your goals for this course?”, “What are some specific assignments you would like to complete?”, and “On what basis can we assess the work you do with your ESL partners?”

I learned, among many things, that the ESL group was nervous about completing the written assignments for the course, and that they would enjoy one-on-one help from knowledgeable tutors, and that my preservice teachers were excited to work with the ESL students and were nervous about cross-cultural interaction and their knowledge of pedagogical grammar. Knowing the students were invested, I went about creating interclass pairs—one teacher-in-training, one EAP student learner, who would help one another complete several course assignments.¹

The Language and Literacy Biography Interview: Raising Awareness and Promoting Confidence

For the first project, and as a means to get to know one another, the TESOL students completed a language and literacy biography by interviewing their assigned EAP student (see appendix for the assignment prompt). Using questions inspired by course readings, the TESOL students created a profile of the learner and discussed implications for his or her academic literacy acquisition process. Questions included the following:

• Where did you learn to write?

• How did you learn to write? What kind of assignments did you complete?

• Do you like to write in your first/other language(s)?

• What is your English language learning history? Specifically, did you learn mostly from talking and listening (you were an “ear” learner), or from reading and taking language/grammar classes (an “eye” learner)?

• Is there anything you would like to ask me about myself? About writing in general?
  

From these interview questions, the EAP students became familiar with important ideas (for example, ear learners vs. eye learners) and benefited from this increased self-awareness. For example, in class and in office hours, I could ask my EAP students questions such as “Now that you have identified yourself as an ear learner, what do you think you need to look for as you revise written assignments?” and “What strengths do you have as a writer in your first/strongest academic language that you can bring into this classroom?” Awareness, as I told both classes, is the first step to confidence and independence, and vital in an EAP class in which a major goal is to foster self-editing and revision skills. My TESOL students also reported that the understanding they gained about their partners made them feel better prepared to embark on the second project, a series of tutoring sessions. This project is described below.

The Tutoring Reflection: Putting Theory Into Practice

In order to make the TESOL class readings on second language acquisition and composition theory concrete, and to provide a much needed opportunity to apply these theories and concepts in the real world, the TESOL students met with their EAP partners for three tutoring sessions during which they worked with the EAP students’ written drafts for my course (see appendix for prompt). The pedagogy students applied information from Teaching Academic English Writing (Hinkel, 2004), Teaching L2 Composition (Ferris & Hedgcock, 2013), and ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors (Bruce & Rafoth, 2009), and described their experiences in a formal write-up and classroom presentation.

Keeping ESL Training Relevant

In this assignment, each teacher-in-training was able to explore aspects of the experience they deemed most relevant. Intrigued by Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), for example, one TESOL student discussed several of these teachable moments that occurred with her language partner (which, happily, led to a discussion of the teachers’ own ZPD moments). Another student was intrigued by the notion of appropriating a writer’s intended meaning and provided specific examples from his tutoring sessions in which he felt the temptation to completely reword a sentence for his partner, but did not. Another student was excited to report that she finally felt comfortable explaining how to use the definite article.

As a result of these sessions, I believe that the EAP students became more comfortable with the culturally unfamiliar concept of nondirective tutoring (particularly the fact that they were expected to set goals for the sessions, not the tutors). Building on the relationship they had established during their literacy biography interview, the tutors encouraged the student writers to be active participants in the identification of problems and the revision of their written work. This, in turn, helped the EAP students benefit from tutoring sessions at the Writing Center as well as private writing conferences with me.

Role Reversals

One final activity I would like to mention was a role reversal assignment in which the EAP student served as an authority, helping the TESOL student complete a short course assignment in the pedagogical grammar unit (see appendix for prompt). In this assignment, the pairs were given a list of sentences for the EAP student to translate into their L1 and asked to discuss the differences between the two versions. Example sentences were:

(1) It has been raining for four days.

(2) I left the flash drive and the books at the library!

A translation of sentence (1) would highlight any differences in the way that verb tense and aspect is conveyed in the two languages. For example, the Chinese version would rely on lexical items such as “since” instead of grammatical morphemes such as -ing (Swan & Smith 2001, p. 319). Sentence (2) would provide insight into how the L1 conveys definiteness. Both the graduates and the undergraduates reported that the conversations around the translations were just plain fun, but also that they enabled them to discuss grammar structures and grammatical differences in a very concrete way.

Adapting Partnerships to Other Contexts

Not all writing centers and writing programs will have a for-credit graduate-level ESL writing pedagogy course available to their writing professionals, and the tutors and instructors themselves may be unable to commit to a full semester course. However, partnerships can occur on a smaller scale. For example, the writing center could contact a willing ESL instructor to see if his or her ESL students would like to be part of project such as the guided tutoring sessions, and interested writing center tutors could elect to participate. In this shortened version, the tutors could (1) meet once with writing center faculty development staff to prepare and discuss relevant readings, (2) once to process the tutoring sessions as a group, and, finally, (3) submit a report to be assessed by the appropriate writing center personnel. For motivation’s sake, I suggest that such a program be formally recognized by the writing center/writing program, whatever that would entail, and that participation in the partnership should be included in letters of reference and noted on tutors’ CVs.

Concluding Remarks

I will conclude with some considerations for the future. From the students’ end-of semester anonymous assessments, I learned that the greatest challenge, typical of classes that have a practicum component, was time management. Unfortunately, we lost the opportunity to discuss several theoretical readings on the course syllabus. Also, we were so busy processing tutoring experiences with college undergraduates that we de-emphasized other populations, including immigrant and refugee learners in adult education contexts. In the future, with more up-front planning, I hope to establish partnerships with more varied learners.

In the end, I believe that this program was a significant step toward meeting the goals of the ESL program, and I do believe that the participants benefited from the opportunity to work together. I saw my TESOL students apply concepts from L2 composition pedagogy to real life situations, and their confidence and ability to reflect on their pedagogical decisions increase over the semester. I saw my EAP students learn about themselves as writers, gain confidence working with language consultants, and engage in the larger community not only as a passive recipient of assistance but as a cultural and linguistic authority—and as a friend.

Note

1. I provided the option to decline to participate without penalty, but no student requested it.

References

Bruce S. & Rafoth, B. (Eds.). (2009). ESL writers: A guide for writing center tutors (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Ferris, D. R., & Hedgcock, J. (2013). Understanding student populations and instructional contexts. In Teaching L2 composition: Purpose, process, and practice (2nd ed., pp. 29–56). New York, NY: Routledge.

Hinkel, E. (2004). Teaching academic ESL writing: Practical techniques in vocabulary and grammar. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Swan, M., & Smith, B. (2001). Learner English. A teacher’s guide to interference and other problems. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Jessica Gerard received her PhD in second language acquisition and teaching from the University of Arizona in 2007. Since then, she has served as director of ESL Writing at Case Western Reserve University and Course Director of University Writing International at Columbia University.

Appendix: Assignment Sheets for the Teaching ESL Pedagogy Course