The trouble with tutoring as a crutch

I have been employed as a peer tutor at Writing Tutorial Services, which provides free services to all IU students, for the past year.

I enjoy my job most of the time, but working at WTS has exposed me to a serious failure in IU policy.

I do not have access to the raw data, but in my anecdotal experience at WTS, more than half the students I see are international students who are not proficient in English.

When I ask these students what their specific concerns are with their writing, they almost always reply that grammar is one of their primary concerns.

This puts me in an awkward position. WTS exists to create better writers, not better writing, meaning we do not proofread papers for grammatical mistakes.

WTS tutors are trained to focus on the structure of a piece of writing and how effectively a writer communicates their ideas. Grammar undoubtedly affects communication, but simply correcting someone’s mistakes does nothing to improve their overall skill at writing.

We are allowed to identify patterns of grammatical error and to teach students how to recognize and correct these types of errors, but ultimately we are not trained as grammar instructors.

But how are we supposed to decide where “patterns of error” start and stop in papers written by international students who are not entirely fluent in English?

Furthermore, many professors do not understand the mission of WTS and send their international students to us with the expectation that we will churn out grammatically perfect essays.

But whatever criticisms I have of professors pale before those I have of the administration.

Regardless of the current admissions standards for international students, which require one of four different demonstrations of English proficiency, there are obviously huge swathes of students being admitted who are not proficient in spoken or written English.

I do not believe all students must be proficient in English when they first arrive at IU, but these students are not receiving the assistance they need. Instead, they’re being thrown into classes, including W131 and other basic writing classes, where they cannot be reasonably compared to their American peers.

WTS tutors do their best to help the international students who come to us, but the level of instruction many of these students require in basic grammar falls outside our stated purpose.

WTS is not the ideal service for many of the students we see, but international students continue to make appointments with us precisely because no other service on campus even approximates what we do.

If IU is going to continue to admit students who are not proficient in English, then it must begin providing those students with the intimate English instruction they require. This means offering not just remedial English courses for the least proficient students, but  also continuing and flexible instruction that is responsive to student needs.

Essentially, rather than treating WTS as the singular form of tutoring on campus, IU needs an international student tutoring service modeled on WTS but adjusted to the specific language needs of these students.

­— atcrane@indiana.edu