MISCOMMUNICATION WITH STUDENTS

Though we wish we all were, tutors are not mind readers and oftentimes have no idea what is going on in the mind of a student. There are ways to counter this; building rapport, asking questions, and working with students consistently over time. However, these techniques cannot solve every issue of miscommunication between tutor and student.

Students may struggle with miscommunication for various reasons. They could have a disability, only know English as a secondary language, or may just find it difficult to communicate their thoughts clearly.

Follow the links to learn how best to navigate interactions with students with disabilities, or English Language Learners (ELLs).

When miscommunication arises with a student, it could present itself in various ways. Miscommunication could be literal if a student’s first language is not English. But miscommunications can also root from a tutor not understanding the point a student is making or trying to make.

LISTEN to the following podcast from Penny Freel about how tutors can best help struggling students

Expectations

Many miscommunications between tutor and student arise from mismatched expectations in a session. Tutors approach a session with knowledge of pedagogy and writing. Their role in the course is to help students refine their writing skill sets, not to teach, edit or correct. On the other hand, students may approach a tutoring session expecting tutors to give them the answers, edit their papers, or even tell them what to write.

The CRLA Handbook refers to these mismatched expectations as “codependency” issues (161).

“There is a danger that instead of empowering students to develop independent learning and living skills, many tutorial and mentoring programs perpetuate codependency by relying on the “quick fix” : they train tutors and mentors to give answers rather than assist students to develop and practice skills necessary to discover answers” (Winnard, 1991)

According to Karen E Winnard’s article “Codependency: Teaching Tutors not to Rescue,” Codependency is defined as:

“…the need to rescue, take care of, fix or control another person or situation.”

What tutors must understand when they begin working with students in the SWW Composition Program, is that it is not their responsibility to rescue students, to ensure they get the perfect grade, or to support their emotional well-being. Tutors rather act as guides to a student’s development of their writing skills. However, this does not mean tutors should be cold as ice or only concerned with a student’s writing skills, as students must have their basic needs fulfilled before they can realize their potential and strive toward important goals.

Setting Intention

To ensure students and tutors are on the same page as they work together throughout the course, tutors should set expectations and intentions with students as early on as possible in their interactions. When a student communicates what they intend to work on for the session, tutors should make the student aware of the parameters of their role in the classroom.

Dealing with Push Back: Conversational Moves

Tutoring is not always a simple interaction. Some students are reluctant to admit they aren’t experts or that they’ve gotten something wrong. In the series of questions and answers below, the answers are all taken from Innhwa Park’s article “Stepwise Advice Negotiation in Writing Center Peer Tutoring.” Note: the in-text citations have been removed for clarity of reading.

What happens when people accept advice from another person?:

Acceptance tokens are usually provided without any delays or hesitations and are conducive to sequence closing, allowing progressivity in interaction. For example, advice recipients often deploy marked acknowledgments to register the advice as new information and commit to undertaking it; such marked acknowledgments include news receipts, ‘oh’, as well as repeats of the key words within the preceding advice. They also indicate their acceptance by providing a summary statement of the advice or asking a question that advances the advised course of action (e.g., logistical issues in adopting the advice). (Park 363)

What about resistance to advice? Well, there is passive resistance:

Advice recipients use unmarked acknowledgments such as ‘mm-hmm’, ‘yeah’, ‘right’ or withhold any acknowledgment tokens to convey passive resistance to the given advice. Upon the recipient’s minimal acknowledgment, or lack thereof, the advice provider often orients to getting acceptance from the recipient to close the sequence; the advisor typically continues with the turn by reformulating the previous recommendation and providing a rationale, resulting in sequence expansion. (Park 364)

Overt rejection of a tutor’s advice is also possible of course: Lastly, participants can resist advice with overt rejection. The methods of rejection include straightforward rejection (e.g., ‘no’), assertions of knowledge or competence (e.g., ‘I know’), and reportings of conditions or details only known to the advisee (e.g., ‘well, it doesn’t always work for me’). A growing number of conversation analytic studies in pedagogical discourse have added that in academic contexts, students provide accounts of prior attempts as well as assertions of their own agenda, invocation of authority, and minimization of the import of the advice to show resistance to their instructors’ advice. The most salient finding present in many studies is that the resistance is often, although not always, presented as dispreferred response with delays, mitigations, and qualifications. . . .

What are stepwise conversational moves? The study then analyzes how tutors effectively use “stepwise” conversational approaches to shift a student’s initial rejection of a suggestion. “Stepwise” is described as “an overall sequence organization that consists of multiple turns across different speakers.” The study “shows how the students’ advice resistance helps the tutors navigate toward a gap in the students’ knowledge and expand the initial advice in ways that are tailored to the students, resulting in successful advice negotiation.” (Park 362)

READ through the scenarios on pages 367-371 of Park’s article and think about the following questions:

-What are the issues that these tutors encounter with students?

-How do tutors use discussion and supportive language to help a student work through their ideas and accept advice?