THE WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY WRITING CENTER

Tutoring Handbook

Spring 2012 Revision

Internet Links: • The WFU Writing Center – http://college.wfu.edu/writingcenter • WCOnline – http://wfu.mywconline.com • The WFU Writing Center on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/WFUWritingCenter

(Please “Like” us!) • Writer’s Help – http://writershelp.com Acknowledgments: Special thanks are due to the following people, without whom this handbook revision would not have been possible: Mr. Tom McGohey, former Director of the Writing Center Ms. Rachel Ernst (MA ’11), former Graduate Assistant and Tutor Ms. Anna Willis (MA ’11), former Graduate Assistant and Tutor The students of ENG 287/EDU 387 “Tutoring Writing” – spring 2012

Table of Contents: Who We Are, Who We Work With, Who You Are 1 Qualities of a Successful Tutor 2 Writing Center Policies 3

• Scheduling Appointments • Walk-Ins and Missed Appointments • Sessions

Tutor Policies 3

• Attendance and Finding Substitutes • Front Desk • Phone Policy • Any Questions? • Timecards • Snapshot of a Session

Using WCOnline 7

• Creating an Account • Making Appointments • Canceling, Moving, and Changing Appointments

Writing Reports 10

• Submitting a Report • A Basic Report Template • Reports at a Glance • Sample Reports

Tutoring ESL Students 13

• Tutor Role: Collaborator or Informant? • Cultural Differences • Tutoring Grammar • Patterns of Error to Look For

Tutoring Students with Learning Disabilities 15

• What is a Learning Disability? • Establishing Relationships with LD Students • Finding the Best Strategy • Personal Interaction

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Who We Are The Wake Forest University Writing Center The Writing Center at Wake Forest University offers students a relaxed and welcoming place to discuss writing and the writing process with trained peer tutors. The Center is staffed by friendly and knowledgeable Wake Forest undergraduate and graduate students who act as an audience for students’ writing; they work by asking questions to help students discover what they want to say and if they have effectively communicated what they intended to say. Because everyone writes differently, we tailor our help to meet each student’s needs. Tutors do not evaluate, correct, proofread, or edit student assignments; our main goal is to help students become confident critical readers of their own writing. We provide consultation during every stage of the writing process, including:

• Generating ideas and settling on a topic • Organizing ideas in a paper • Developing support for arguments • Composing more effectively • Learning to revise drafts • Learning to identify and correct errors in grammar and punctuation

Generally speaking, the earlier in the writing process that a student visits us, the more useful and productive his or her tutorial session(s) will be. Many students find they have the most success working with us when they come to the Writing Center as soon as they have received a writing assignment.

Who We Work With Students at all levels come to the Writing Center. Tutors find themselves working with writers on everything from first year seminar papers to lab reports to sections of a master’s thesis. By focusing on the Writing Center’s mission to help students become confident critical readers of their own writing, tutors are able to work with students regardless of year, topic, or genre of writing. In some cases, tutors may even have the opportunity to work critically with staff and faculty on their writing.

Who You Are You were hired to work at the Writing Center because you’re a compassionate, confident academic writer, but your role as a tutor is that of an attentive audience rather than an expert instructor. Each session should be treated as a conversation about a peer’s writing process. You are a sounding board for students’ concerns, helping them to talk through their ideas. You are a lay reader, not a subject specialist (ethically, we cannot offer advice on content, even when we ARE experts in a subject).

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Occasionally, you won’t know how to cite something, or the particulars of a specific grammar rule, but you know where to look for the answers to these questions, and can point students toward helpful resources. Your job is to listen carefully and ask thoughtful questions, in order to guide students toward careful examination of their own work. You help students to see beyond the paper at hand by pointing out processes, patterns and methods, rather than simple errors and mistakes. And when it comes down to it, you’re an enthusiastic and positive facilitator. You don’t just tell students what to do, you help them figure out the writing process by putting words on paper, and techniques into practice, right in the moment.

Qualities of a Successful Tutor A good tutor should:

1. Care about students and their writing.

2. Start where the student is and plan on responding accordingly, helping the student progress according to his/her needs and specific learning style.

3. Be patient and allow plenty of time. Learning to write requires time--time for trial

and error, for backing up and starting over, for new habits to form.

4. Jacques Barzun lists three qualities for a good teacher: kindness, firmness, and a good memory. Encourage, provide resources, but expect that the student will do their work. With this expectation in place students are more likely to engage in their session.

5. Remain professional, however friendly. Don’t gossip about faculty, other

students, or fellow tutors.

6. Provide students with honest, constructive feedback but leave grading and discussion of classroom methods and assignments to professors.

7. Be generous with honest, genuine praise for a student’s effort and progress.

8. Frame your responses as a reader, not an authority, by using the language of “I”

when discussing a student’s paper. Saying “You are inconsistent here,” or “Your subjects and verbs don’t agree,” comes across as judgment rather than communication. Using language such as, “I’m not sure how this sentence fits into the paragraph,” focuses on your response as a reader and encourages students to talk through problems in their papers.

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Writing Center Policies Scheduling Appointments Students can schedule one appointment a day and two per week. Students can walk-in if a tutor is available, but they

• cannot have back-to-back appointments, and • cannot have more than two appointments in a day (one scheduled and one walk-

in). Walk-ins and Missed Appointments

• All appointments, including walk-ins, must be entered online before the session begins.

• Walk-ins should be taken up until half past the hour. After this, use your discretion, but let them know that the appointment will not continue over into the next hour. Encourage them to wait and make an appointment for a full session if they can.

• If a student is more than 10 minutes late and a walk-in student is waiting, mark the appointment as missed and take the walk-in.

• If a student is late and there are no walk-ins, wait 30 minutes to mark the appointment as a no-show.

Sessions Sessions begin on the hour and can go up to 50 minutes after the hour. The last ten minutes of the hour are an important time for taking notes, writing reports or preparing for your next session. If students need more time, encourage them to sign up for a later appointment, but be firm about our policy – it’s not negotiable.

Tutor Policies Attendance and Finding Substitutes Tutors are responsible for all their shifts. If you are not able to work your hours, it’s your job to find a substitute. To find a substitute or trade hours, talk to your fellow tutors or email a request to the Writing Center listserv. If no one takes your hours, you will still need to work them. Once someone agrees to take your hours, you’ll need to notify the director or a graduate assistant so they can change the online schedule. If you are sick and cannot make a shift, please call the Writing Center (336-758-5768). If it’s after hours, email Ryan at shireyrd@wfu.edu.

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Front Desk The front desk is the welcome center of the Writing Center. There must be a tutor at the front desk at all times, unless all tutors are working with students. The responsibilities of the tutor at the desk (or, if everyone is working, the tutor by the door) include:

• Greeting all visitors as soon as they walk in • Sending students with appointments to the appropriate tutor • Assisting new students with registering and signing up for appointments • Directing all other visitors to the appropriate faculty office or classroom • Answering the phone

It is our goal to be cheerful and helpful to everyone who comes into the Writing Center, whether they have an appointment or not. Phone Policy The tutor sitting at the front desk is responsible for answering the phone and checking messages. If all tutors are working with students and the phone rings, a tutor should pause his or her session and quickly answer the phone. A greeting along the lines of “Wake Forest Writing Center, this is (your name),” is appropriate. Directions on how to transfer calls and answer messages are listed on the wall next to the phone. Any Questions? If you or your students have any questions regarding policy during your shift direct them to the Graduate Assistant working with you. Also, if you ever have a disagreement with a student about scheduling or policy, feel free to refer the student to Ryan or the GA on duty. Timecards Tutor timecards are maintained on the win.wfu.edu website, and tutors are responsible for logging their own hours as well as submitting them by midnight on the last day of each month.

Steps for logging and submitting tutor hours: 1) Log in to http://win.wfu.edu. 2) Click on the Personal tab in the upper right hand corner of the screen. 3) Click on My Timecards under the heading Student Payroll. 4) Depending on how many jobs you work on campus you may have multiple

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timecards. Select the Writing Center timecard from the list, which will look like this on your screen:

5) On your timecard, select the correct date from the pull-down menu and enter your hours. The system won’t accept your hours unless you enter them in the full format below (10:00 a.m.). 6) Click the Save button after you add your hours. The Save button DOES NOT submit your hours; it just saves your entry. If you need to enter several days at once, clicking the Update button will log your last entry and give you another blank day in which to enter additional hours. 7) Before midnight on the last day of each month, you’ll need to submit your hours. Make sure you’ve entered and saved all your hours for that month, and click the Submit key. If your hours have been submitted correctly, the link to your timecard will no longer appear on your screen.

If you have any questions about your hours, or if you forget to submit your timecard before midnight on the last day of the month, please speak to the director.

Snapshot of a Session Due to the individual nature of tutoring sessions, there isn’t a single approach to working with students. However, every session will generally include the four basic steps below:

1) Interview the student 2) Read the paper 3) Discussion and application 4) Wrap-up

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Every session is scheduled for fifty minutes starting at the top of the hour. Depending on the assignment you may not use the entire block of time, but this guide may be used regardless of how long a session lasts. 1) Interview Introduce yourself and spend a few minutes interviewing the student. You might even engage in some small talk. This is your chance to set a friendly, open tone for the session and to make sure that the student feels his or her concerns will be addressed. Some helpful questions include the following:

• What is the prompt for the assignment? Do you have it on hand? When is it due? • What are your concerns or goals going into this session? • Have you received any specific feedback from this professor on earlier papers?

2) Read the paper Once you’ve interviewed the student, it’s time to start working! If the student has a paper, ask him or her to read it aloud. If a student is uncomfortable reading aloud, explain the benefits – that it allows us to access papers in a different way, and that writers often “hear” errors more easily than they can see them – and if the student still resists, you can read it aloud, or read it together silently (this can work for papers longer than 10 pages as well, or you can choose sections to read aloud). No matter what, the student should be reading the paper with you. It is important that the student maintain control of the paper throughout the session. As you listen to the paper, look for patterns that you can address globally, like missing topic sentences, semicolon abuse, or unclear organization. However, if you don’t notice overarching patterns right away, don’t stress. They often become clearer as you work through the paper together. Encourage students to mark up their papers while they read them to you, and jot down notes for yourself on the legal pad if you need to. Of course, while most sessions will work this way, sometimes students come in during the planning stages of their papers. The same basic structure works for planning sessions, though – talk about the assignment, review their plans, notes, outlines, or any other materials, and then get ready to ask them questions about what you’ve noticed or are unclear about. In planning sessions, students can use their computers or our legal pads to brainstorm, write down ideas and outlines, or draft sections of their papers. 3) Discussion and Application After you have read the paper together, ask the student what he or she noticed in the read-through. Go back to the spots that the student marked as well as any passages that you marked or have questions about. Depending on the student’s goals for the session, you may work through passages individually or you may choose to concentrate on an overarching theme or concern that presented itself in the paper (argumentation, organization, informal language, focusing the thesis, etc).

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Tutors should never take the paper away from the student, and the tutor should avoid writing in corrections. By letting students write in their own changes and corrections, you can make sure that they are fully engaged in the session, and help them to put into practice the new ideas and techniques under discussion. 4) Wrap-up Use the last few minutes of a session to talk over what you worked on. Ask students to list what they plan to work on after leaving, what they are taking away from the session, and if they need another appointment.

Reports After wrapping up, either immediately write a report on the session or take notes to use later (trust us – you’ll forget them later!). Narrative accounts are submitted for each session through WC Online. Further detail is available in the WCOnline section of this handbook. Follow-up Appointments If you were unable to meet all of a student’s goals in a session or if they are planning major revisions or another draft, encourage them to make another appointment with you or another tutor. They can schedule the appointment at the front desk computer before leaving or on their own computers at their convenience.

Using WCOnline (WCO) You’ll use WCO to make appointments, keep track of your schedule, file reports after sessions and look up your students’ older reports. You can access WCO from our website: http://college.wfu.edu/writingcenter Or by typing in the actual URL (bookmark it now!): http://wfu.mywconline.com Creating an Account Students and tutors will need to create an account with WCO the first time they use it. WCO requires an email address with an @wfu.edu suffix, but it is not linked to the university website, so the password you create for it can be different from you email/WIN password and it won’t need to be changed at the same intervals. You can register by clicking the tiny link above the log-in boxes on the front page (see below). Keep in mind that new students might need help finding this link, due to its ridiculous tininess.

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Making appointments Once you’re registered and logged in, the current week’s schedule will appear. Each day shows the tutors on duty and the hours they’re available.

Hour blocks are color-coded according to the key above the schedule. A student will see gold blocks for pending appointments, light gray blocks for past reservations, and green blocks where other students have already signed up for an hour. Tutors get the same view, so you’ll probably never see gold unless you make an appointment with another tutor (but feel free to do so!). When a tutor logs on, he or she can mouse over hour blocks to see the names of students who have made appointments.

Students can make an appointment for the time and tutor of their choosing by clicking on an open white block. This will open a pop-up window where they can enter information about their professor, class and assignment. Once they’ve made the appointment, WCO will send them a reminder email.

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As a tutor, you can log in with your email address and make an appointment for any registered student. If you need to do this, just make sure to select the student’s name from the pull-down menu and enter the student’s class information in the required form boxes. If the student is a walk-in, make sure to check the “Walk-In/Drop-In”box. Canceling, Moving and Changing Appointments Tutors can cancel any appointment, and students can cancel their own appointments, by clicking on the appropriate hour, checking the “Cancel this appointment” box at the bottom of the Modify Appointment pop-up and hitting the “Save Changes” button. In the Administrator-Only section of this Modify Appointment window, tutors can also:

• Mark appointments as “missed” if a student no-shows without notifying us. Once a student has missed two appointments in the system, they’ll be locked out and will need to come talk to the director before they can make any more. We don’t mark appointments as missed until 30 minutes past the hour of the

The tutor’s name appears at the top of the window. The student’s name appears below in the pull-down list.

Students should always enter professor and course, unless they want to work on an application letter or another extracurricular writing project, in which case they should enter “N/A” and “NCW 000,” respectively.

Tutors never use this line, but the director can use it in special circumstances to set up recurring appointments.

Check the Walk-in box if a student walks in. If you don’t, they’ll be signed up for a regular appointment, which counts toward their limit of two scheduled appointments a week. If a student is a “no-show,” please check Missed.

These sections allow students to indicate their particular concerns for their writing. Feel free to consult this information before a session.

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appointment, or 10 minutes past if another student is waiting. • View past session reports for the student by clicking on “View Existing Forms.” • Submit a session report by clicking “Add New.”

Writing Reports For each session you work, you will write a report, which will be filed via WCO and emailed to the student’s professor. Reports serve a double function: they help us keep track of the work we do with students, and they demonstrate to professors what kind of work the student has done in his or her session (and what kind of work we do in general in the Writing Center). Thus your reports must walk a fine line of being detailed and helpful to future tutors, but showing your work in the best light possible for professors.

Reports must be written and submitted within 24 hours of your session.

Submitting a Report Click on the hour block of your appointment, and then click “Add new” in the admin-only box. In the pop-up that appears, you’ll need to enter:

1) THE REPORT EMAIL: wfuwritingcenter@gmail.com (if you don’t, the report may be lost).

2) The length of the appointment from the pull-down menu 3) Your report in the box under “Comments”

This will cancel an appointment. A student or tutor can cancel the appointment up until its scheduled start time. After that, only a tutor can. If the student misses the session, please mark it “Missed,” rather than cancelling it.

To enter a new report or view existing reports on a student’s previous sessions, use these links.

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A Basic Report Template As you get used to writing reports, you’ll probably fall into your own pattern that looks more or less like the one below. How you choose to structure your reports is up to you, but all reports should include the same basic information. 1) [Student’s name] brought in her paper/draft/outline on [topic of paper,] concerned about [x,y,z]. This demonstrates that you did, in fact, ask the student about the assignment and his or her concerns. It also helps the professor to identify the student and the paper in question. Every single report should include this basic information. 2) She read the paper aloud to me, pausing after each paragraph to write in notes about incomplete ideas and structures she felt were “awkward.” After reading through the paper, she mentioned that her introduction felt incomplete, so she explained her thesis out loud to me, and then reworked her thesis statement to more clearly match her ideas. The bulk of your report will be a narrative account of what you did in the session, avoiding any and all evaluative language. You don’t have to write out every step you take, but give a good sense of the major areas the student worked on in the session. To make it clear to the professor that we’re not doing work for the student, put these sections in terms of what the student did – she noticed x, she decided x, she drafted x –

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rather than what you, or even “we” did. “We” did not rewrite her introduction. She did. As a tutor, you can suggest, encourage, explain, point out, and ask questions. The student should do everything else. 3) I encouraged her to examine subsequent paragraphs to ensure that they connected to and clarified a particular aspect of her thesis. At the end of the session, [student] had added new topic sentences to several paragraphs, and left intending to check through the remaining sections. Finally, give the professor a sense of where the session closed and the students’ plans for the paper after the session. Reports at a Glance

• Narrative accounts of the student’s concerns and work in the session • Never include evaluations of the student, the work, or the assignment • Keep description in terms of student, not the tutor • Give a sense of the student’s plans after the session • Are grammatically correct and written as clearly as possible

Sample Reports

“Huck came in with a page of quotes for a paper that he was planning to write about Middlemarch. He mainly wanted to talk over the page of quotes in order to unpack them enough to where he felt like he could write a comprehensive outline. We read the quotes out loud together and he talked about why they were important in the context of the novel. I then asked him what they all had in common, and also what features, if any, were mutually illuminating. He decided that he could separate the quotes into two different groups that would create a dichotomy between the characters. We then thought about the two groups and what they said about the characters. Huck never stopped taking notes and he discovered that he had much more to say about the quotes than he initially realized. As he left our session he felt confident about being able to make an outline for his paper.”

“Jim was working on his paper on the Crying of Lot 49. He had spoken with his professor about his outline, but had gotten stuck on the last few pages of the paper. After we read through what he had written already, Jim said he thought he needed more detail in several paragraphs. I asked him to explain his ideas, and then he wrote down where he was going and added notes to remind him of quotes he wanted to add. When he had fleshed out and reorganized a few body paragraphs, Jim and I talked about his introduction and conclusion. He brainstormed possible links between the dysfunctional communication in Pynchon's novel and in America in the 1960s, and then he revised his introduction to better reflect the actual scope of the paper. He planned to finish writing the conclusion on his own after he left. ”

“Becky brought in a book report about the use of stereotypes in "The Little Prince." She wanted to work on the thesis, topic sentences, and conclusion for the first half of her project. After reading through the essay paragraph-by-paragraph, Becky returned to the thesis and we talked about not just if and how the book was using stereotype, but why, or to what end? She applied the same question to her topic sentence and her conclusion to give the paper greater continuity. To transition into the conclusion and relate her specific example to the book as a whole, Becky also wrote several new sentences she planned to add to the paper. For macro-level transitions, since the project as a whole had two distinct parts, we spent some time talking about different formatting options

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that would help Becky's reader move between them. Finally, because one of the concerns Becky had identified with respect to her thesis was the length of the sentence, we took a few minutes to look at sentence level issues. Becky and I identified a few unclear or convoluted sentences, and she worked on breaking them down into their component parts and then reassembling them in a way that made more sense to her. As a strategy for future assignments, I suggested she read long sentences aloud without stopping for breath until she hit a period; if she ran out of breath repeatedly, she might consider breaking the sentence into two ideas. ”

“Tom brought in a paper on Clarence Thomas that his professor had returned to him for revision. At first, he showed me a clean copy of the paper, but after talking with me for a few minutes, he told me the paper had been returned to him for errors. He then showed me the copy with his professor's comments. At first, Tom expressed discouragement about his writing abilities. In particular, he was concerned that he had made so many technical errors that he could not identify. After Tom read the paper aloud, we began by looking at a few of the problems his professor had noted. During our discussion, I learned that Tom was unaware of some of the stylistic and formatting guidelines for academic writing. For example, he had not indented his paragraphs and he had employed contractions, passive voice and the use of first person. After encouraging Tom to check with his professor on any specific guidelines she wanted him to use, I also directed him to online resources where he could review general expectations for academic papers. We then looked at Tom's content, with an emphasis on his introductory paragraph. Tom neglected to make a claim until near the end of the paper, so we talked about how he could integrate this argument as a clear thesis. He also shared extensive biographical information on Thomas, but I was not sure how that fit into the paper. Tom explained that he wanted to stress the poor upbringing that Thomas had as a way of lessening criticism that, as a conservative, Thomas was out of touch with certain socio-economic groups. Tom and I talked about ways he could add his own analysis to better articulate and support his claims. At the end of the session, Tom said that he felt much better about his ability to revise his paper. He planned to take the style/grammatical guidelines we had discussed and apply them to the rest of his paper on his own. He also planned to review his content to ensure that he incorporated his own analysis. ”

Tutoring ESL Students Tutor Role: Collaborator or Informant? The most important thing to consider in tutoring ESL students is that they often do not share the same assumptions about writing practices in general and expectations for the academic essay in particular. Asking the same kind of questions we would with a native speaker requires the ESL student to draw on nonexistent shared experiences about learning patterns, rhetorical expectations, and notions of audience. They are used to writing out of an entirely different cultural and academic context, and asking questions based on shared assumptions about that context will probably only frustrate them and you. What may appear to be a shy or lazy student who wants us to do the work for them is more likely a confused student who simply has little knowledge of writing practices and expectations that we take for granted. Therefore we need to adjust our role from that of collaborator to a kind of cultural-rhetorical informant. What this means in practical terms is that we need to be more directive in explaining the rhetorical conventions of an American academic essay and the expectations of an audience. Where we ask native speakers questions to help them make decisions on their own about their writing, we need to show ESL speakers how an academic essay works. In some cases, that may mean supplying them with a format – what a thesis looks like, its placement, creating transitional sentences, etc. This does not mean writing it for them.

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You can still ask questions to help them generate material, but then you may need to model the format of a thesis or transition, using sentence paradigms or examples. Cultural Differences

• Rhetorical expectations and thought patterns: o English: emphasizes linear thinking that subordinates idea; start with a

clear thesis and move in a straight line, asserting ideas clearly and directly. o Arabic: emphasizes sequence of events and balance of thought, forms that

favor coordination (sentences strung together with series of ands or buts. o Asian: emphasizes circular approach, talking “around” the subject, avoid

direct, assertive statements. o Romance Languages: allow more freedom to digress, explore tangential

ideas not directly supporting “main point” or topic sentence. • Reader/Writer Responsibility: Role of Audience

o English: expects writer to “do all the work”: provide context, make clear conceptual connections in thinking and transitions in structure.

o Asian: expects reader to fill in the gaps and read between the lines, to infer connections and fill in context.

• Personal Attitudes about Criticism/ “Failure” o In other cultures, criticism is often taken as a sign of shame and personal

failure. Therefore, it’s even more important to direct attention to problems using “I” language – “I don’t understand this” - instead of “You” language – “You jump around too much here.”

Tutoring Grammar First, remember that ESL students come in many levels. Some might be very well-versed in grammar (maybe even more so than you are) and just need help catching certain patterns of error. Others may not have studied grammar explicitly, or are just beginning English. Still, keep in mind that ESL students have already accomplished something that’s incredibly difficult – communicating and composing in a foreign language! Even if a session is frustrating, let them know you respect them for the hard work they’re doing. Since many ESL students lack an intuitive, culturally-based sense of the language, relying on oral proofreading is not a good strategy, because they tend not to hear or see problems automatically. Therefore, you will need to be more directive in this area, which means pointing out errors, explaining grammar conventions and demonstrating how to fix them. ESL students will often want to know “the rule,” so you should be prepared (use the internet or writing resources in the WC) to give them more technical advice. This does not mean, however, that you simply rewrite entire papers for them. If an error you’ve already discussed appears later in a paper, you can refer back to your earlier method of correcting it and ask the student to fix it themselves (or locate a second example immediately and give them a chance to correct the same type of error without your assistance).

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Patterns of Error to Look For

• Quantity of Words (some, many, much, little, a few, several): o “I bought a few soap.” o “I cooked many rice.”

• Articles with countable or noncount nouns (a, an, the): o “He drank a milk.” (noncount) o “I lost knife” (countable)

• The –s inflection on nouns and verbs (subject/verb agreement): o “The childrens are here.” o “Apes lives in families.” o “The grass need water.”

• Participles and Auxiliary Verbs: o “If you walked to school, you can walked home.” o “We are suppose to call her after the meeting.” o “They have study for a month for this exam.”

• The Use of Negatives (not any, no, hardly any, few, not much, not many, non): o “We don’t need no tickets.” o “He didn’t see hardly no sea gulls on the pier.”

• Shifts in Person: o “A serious student does their work.” o I waited at the corner because that’s where you catch the bus.”

• Possessives: o “This city youth need summer recreation programs.’ o “This chemistry book is her’s.”

Tutoring Students with Learning Disabilities What is a learning disability? The most important thing to know about tutoring LD students is that their disabilities are caused by physiological problems in the brain; they are not evidence of low intelligence or poor upbringing. Many LD students are very bright, but have trouble accessing information already stored in their brains. They may be able to pour out reams of information, but not be able to see, literally, how to shape that information. They may have trouble distinguishing important from less significant information. Therefore, tutors need to be flexible in their approaches, and be prepared to modify traditional tutoring methods or even do things that seem to contradict those methods. Establishing relationships with LD students Many students with a learning disability are very knowledgeable about their situation – they’ve had to live and cope with it all their lives. Don’t attempt to diagnose students, and don’t push them, but also don’t shy away from the subject. Many students will tell you themselves that they have a learning disability. Invite them to inform you about the specifics of their learning disability. How does it present in their work? Ask for a literal

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description of what happens when the student writes. What would they describe as their strengths and weaknesses? What strategies do they already use to cope when they work? Finding the best strategy This will depend on the type of learning disability, but in particular try to identify what type of learner the student is: visual, auditory, or kinesthetic, and use technique that best suit the student’s learning style. This may require that you change some traditional tutoring methods. For example, for auditory learners, you may need to write down their thoughts as they talk, and draw connections on paper as they explain them. For students with problems in processing information spatially – they literally cannot see problems in sentence structure or misspelled words – you may need to read the paper aloud to them so they can hear problems. Because many LD students have trouble accessing information, the technique of free writing can prove frustrating. They can’t imagine the information they’re supposed to be discovering. Instead, you may need to rely more on directed conversation, asking the student very specific questions while you take notes. Because many LD students have trouble storing and retrieving information, be prepared to have to repeat the same techniques every session. Above all, you will need to demonstrate and model specific areas of writing, such as how to compose a thesis statement (use sentence paradigms) or create a transitional sentence. You may need to be more directive in pointing out grammatical errors. Personal interaction For students with forms of attention deficit disorder, you need to remain patient but firm. If they become easily distracted or resistant to participating session, you may need to draw their attention back to the task at hand by giving them clear directions on what you need them to do in order to make progress. You should do this in a firm but polite and respectful way. For students who seem to resist because they lack confidence, you should emphasize the accomplishments they’ve achieved in session so far, or on previous papers you’ve worked on. Above all, it’s important to remember that you can’t assume LD students will see things as quickly as other students; it takes them longer to process information, and therefore you need to remain patient and encouraging. Be creative and do whatever works without doing the work for them! Handbook Revision Version 1.1 Revision 1.2 will include:

• WAC/WID Appendix • Discipline-Specific Conventions • Tutorial Handouts • Data Analysis of WC Usage • Plagiarism Resources