Read Online Tutoring Second Language Writers by Shanti Bruce - Free Book Online

and/or tutors prefer using both languages, since this reflects the culture surrounding them? Or do they prefer to work toward the exclusive target language since English is the language of the university and professional world? As writing centers become more linguistically diverse, these are important questions all centers should be examining as the answers will likely be different from one center to the next.
    Developing a contextualized understanding of code-switching as a tutoring pedagogy is especially valuable because an increasing number of multilingual students and tutors, particularly those who speak Englishand Spanish, are populating our writing centers. Hispanic students are now the largest minority group on college campuses, comprising over 16 percent of all US college students, a number that increases to 25 percent for two-year colleges ( Fry and Lopez 2012 ). Many of these students are bilingual, speaking combinations of Spanish and English at home, school, and work. In many sections of the country, particularly South Florida, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, New York, and the Chicago area, the growing numbers of Hispanic students are reflected in the student demographics we see in our writing centers—both as student-writers and, in increasing numbers, as writing tutors (See Gillespie and Hutchinson, this volume).
    As the number of Hispanic and multilingual students continues to increase, writing center tutors can expect to experience more languages within their daily work environments, whether those languages are for social, professional, or educational purposes. Tutors should be aware of how and when multiple languages can be used during tutoring sessions (see Liu, this volume), and tutors should expect to have more conversations and debates like the ones I had with Alezka and the rest of my staff. Writing center directors can expect some students and tutors to be in favor of a multilingual approach, one that accepts and promotes using mixtures of languages and language varieties; they can also expect some community members to resist multilingual approaches to tutoring writers, holding steadfast to an English-only approach that results in code-segregation ( Guerra 2012 ); and directors and tutors should expect others to be ambivalent, perhaps because they can see both positive and negative outcomes of such an approach.
    If writing centers choose to embrace multilingual approaches to writing center work, we can expect to disrupt some of the more traditional dynamics of our centers. As Nancy Grimm notes,
    When a writing center embraces multilingualism rather than monolingualism as a conceptual norm, many things change. Most importantly, the writing center begins to actively recruit tutors who speak other languages and varieties of English. Not insignificantly, the racial composition of the staff changes. The writing center becomes a place where multiple varieties of English are spoken rather than only historically privileged varieties of English. ( Grimm 2009 , 18)
    Using Grimm’s call as a starting point, this chapter discusses a research project that investigated what happens when “multiple varieties of English are spoken” in a center, not only for social conversation but also during sessions between multilingual tutors and students. The chapter defines key terms related to facilitating multilingual approachesto writing center work and shows transcriptions of tutoring sessions in which tutors or students used both English and Spanish during tutoring sessions. It then discusses tutors’ and students’ attitudes toward using both languages during writing center sessions. The chapter concludes by offering ways to build on this research and to bring languages other than English into writing centers. This research benefitted our work because it helped develop a contextualized understanding of our students’ and tutors’ attitudes toward and experiences with code-switching during writing center