What do you do when students say, “Just check my grammar”? Be flexible and be comfortable with the fluid, back and forth movement between discussing the ideas and the language. It’s good to discourage premature concern with nit-picky editing decisions, but it’s great to encourage exploration of the right language for expressing a great idea. As coaches, you can support the development of writing skills by talking about language at any point in the writing process where it might be helpful. Quite often, though, their ability to develop the content of their essays is limited by a lack of vocabulary or by difficulty with complex sentence structures. Multilingual writers are also developing writers, so they do need the same kind of process-oriented and “higher order” feedback that monolingual writers need.

Multilingual writers are advanced language learners who are working toward the command of a sophisticated range of vocabulary, sentence structures, discipline-specific expressions, idioms, etc. In truth, ideas can not be separated from the language used to express them. Unfortunately, they had the unintended effect of marginalizing discussions of sentence structure, word choice, punctuation, and grammatical errors until very late in the writing process. These ideas are still so powerfully present in writing centers today because they are so very true. In fairness to the scholars above, they meant to emphasize that writers should concentrate on developing their ideas before they worried about comma splices, and to emphasize that truly good writing involved the long-term development of a complex set of skills. The writing process was divided, the writing center’s territory was firmly staked, and the perceived needs of multilingual writers were placed squarely outside the parameters of the writing center’s mission, pedagogical philosophy, and standard procedure. The content of students’ essays should be discussed only as much as necessary for accurate error correction.

Friedlander: Assertion that writing centers meet the needs of foreign students by focusing on mechanical remediation and error correction.

“In a writing center, the object is to make sure that writers, and not necessarily their texts, are what get changed by instruction…our job is to produce better writers, not better writing” (p.

North: Staunch declaration that writing centers were not centers for mechanical remediation and error correction.

Reigstad & McAndrew: Division of the writing process into “higher order” and “lower order” concerns, establishing a value-laden sequence of content and organization before grammar and punctuation.

You will probably recognize the first two because the vocabulary and the philosophy are still driving forces in today’s writing centers: In 1984, several of the most influential texts in writing center history were published.

1984: The triple whammy for multilingual writers The list of strategies is followed by excerpts of coaching sessions, with annotations that illustrate how some of the strategies work in real conversations between writing coaches and multilingual writers. This page provides a bit of important historical context for the discussion and offers strategies for responding to the grammar-checking request in ways that respect the pedagogical philosophies of the writing center and the instructional needs of students writing in a foreign language. Unfortunately, multilingual writers have been unfairly denied access to language feedback because of the very strong prohibition against editing, but the good news is that we can still be very helpful without compromising our principles. “Checking the grammar” can feel uncomfortably close to proofreading and editing students’ papers for them-which writing coaches know is strictly out of bounds. When you ask students writing in English as an additional language what they would like to work on, they will often say that they’d like you to check their grammar. “Just Check My Grammar” What this handout is about

Just to clarify meaning