Tell Me How It Reads: Tutoring Deaf and Hearing Students in the Writing Center

6. Tutoring Deaf Students in the Writing Center

164 C H A P T E R 6  Tutoring Deaf Students in the Writing Center THE OVERARCHING PURPOSE of the research reported in this volume was to discover how tutoring sessions between a deaf tutee and a hearing tutor are conducted. As I analyzed the data, I looked at the dynamic between the participants, what was taught and learned, what information was expressed and how it was conveyed,what specific tutoring practices were used, how the participants felt, and what other factors (e.g., communication) influenced the session.The formal research questions were as follows: • What is the content of a tutorial involving a deaf tutee and a hearing tutor, and is it different from the material that is covered when the participants are a hearing tutor and a hearing student? • How does the tutoring take place? What are the participants’ roles and behaviors? What techniques are used? • What are the contributing and complicating factors: communication, affect, others? In all,tutoring deaf students and hearing students is not that different.Both types of students want to improve their written compositions and their Tutoring Deaf Students in theWriting Center 165 reading, writing, and research skills.The main differences are communication mode and certain foci of content and practice. With a deaf student,the tutoring session appears more likely to be focused on reading for understanding or editing and proofreading, with special attention to grammar. Other key differences seem to be the appropriateness of the directiveness factor and whether hearing and having an“ear”for the language is stressed. In tutorials with deaf students,learning rules of grammar rather than what “sounds right” appears to be stressed. In this conclusion, the interpreters emerge as the star of the tutoring session,and their words become the most important voices, both literally and figuratively. It is the interpreters’ job to translate both language and culture, and in turn, they have helped me unravel what was going on in the sessions. Indeed, the interpreter may be the most important factor in the tutoring equation,as the type of tutoring session I describe here could not take place without an interpreter. Relevant Factors in Tutoring After phrasing one of the initial research questions with the word “dynamic,” I thought nothing of it until the analysis stage.When I tried to look up “dynamic” in my dictionary to see just what I meant by the term, I saw that, as an adjective, it has to do with energy and force, and “dynamics” as a noun has to do with “various forces, physical and moral, operating in any field” (Guralnik 1964, 234). So, what do the energy and force surrounding the tutoring session comprise? What are the physical and moral factors involved in tutoring? The energy and force are mostly positive, and they are geared toward gaining the necessary and desired literacy skills.In addition,all of the student participants share the positive energy of motivation.The physical factors are the placement of bodies,the environment, the ambient temperature, people’s clothes, textual materials like papers and books, technology, demographic factors, the mode of communication,and visual,aural,and tactile stimuli.The moral factors are evaluative questions such as what is good tutoring?What are the qualities of a good tutor? A good tutee? Most of the respondents valued the tutor as someone who will help, give advice and suggestions as needed, and be sensitive to the needs of the tutee. 166 Chapter 6 The first research question dealt with the content of the tutoring session between a deaf student and a hearing tutor.The content or focus of all of the sessions I observed,with both deaf and hearing tutees,consisted either of writing or information work. All of the tutees in the study worked on literacy—reading and writing—to some extent.They worked on planning, composing, revising, editing, and reflecting on what they wrote.The participants’ effort centered on generating ideas for writing assignments, actual composing, revising (either locally or globally), and reflecting on what was written. The tutees also worked on reading and research, which was somewhat of a surprise.This activity consisted of gathering and understanding information. An example of understanding information is working on reading comprehension, and an example of gathering information is doing research. I observed both deaf and hearing tutees engaging in all of these activities, and all of the tutees also revised for lower-order concerns...