Blog #12

Part 1: Reflection on Writing Center (Not Final)

This week was good in the writing center. A woman came in with a paragraph about influences of school groups and how they affect teens. It was interesting because the paragraph was for an English class and she could barely speak English. When the tutor tried to explain things to her about her paragraph she could barely understand him so it was difficult for her to completely comprehend what he was talking about. He had to write down what he was talking about so that she could understand it. It helped me learn how to teach people that don’t speak English how to write. It is hard for them to understand our language let alone write it down on paper. Her grammar was very off, which also made it difficult because half of her paragraph was full of errors. I learned how to look for differences in papers that ESL students write compared to students whose first language is English. I learned that it is difficult for ESL students to get their points across correctly in their writing so we helped her put her thoughts together and then separate them which then helped her understand her own thoughts to write down. This week at the writing center helped me understand how to help students whose English language isn’t their first language.

Part 2: Final Portfolio Preparation

Something that I worked on this semester that I think I should include in my writing portfolio is audience awareness because for the SCA animal project I had to change my audience to college students and that was difficult for me to do even though I am a college student. Another writing piece I worked on was sentence level revision, I believe this should be in my portfolio because I believe I have improved my sentence structure since the beginning of this semester. I have learned a lot about different sentence structures and what to add or take out of sentences. Some pieces I think that I could add into the portfolio is the tri-fold because that was the main thing I had to do to aim to a certain audience which was college students. Another piece is my first blog compared to my final blog because my writing has formed into something better than my first blog. Another could be a piece from my junior writing portfolio, and I believe this would be a good piece because most of my pieces in my junior writing portfolio are from last year or even later than that. It would show how much my writing has formed also.