Date of Award
9-2014
Culminating Project Type
Thesis
Degree Name
English: Teaching English as a Second Language: M.A.
Department
English
College
College of Liberal Arts
First Advisor
Carol Mohrbacher
Second Advisor
James Robinson
Third Advisor
Shawn Jarvis
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Keywords and Subject Headings
Writing Resources, Support, Gaps, Writing Consultants, Concerns
Abstract
Forty-two to 49% of tutorials at St. Cloud State University's writing center are conducted with international students. A percentage this large demands that direct attention be paid to those writing issues specific to international students. This document describes a discovery project investigating the common resources used by St. Cloud State University's writing consultants in dealing with writing issues specific to international students. This project seeks to better understand where gaps exist between student need and resources currently available in the writing center. A survey of the writing consultants and an analysis of tutorial notes over the course of eight weeks revealed the following major writing concerns: article usage, punctuation, word choice, structure, organization, preposition usage, development, coherence and cohesion. This research resulted in the following recommendations for developing supportive writing resources: 1) that the writing handouts be simple, clear, and that they provide relevant examples, 2) that workshops be designed for an international student audience focusing on sentence level issues, 3) and that writing consultants make use of Purdue's OWL (Online Writing Lab).
Recommended Citation
Haag, Mandi E., "Writing Centers: International Student Writing Issues and Resources" (2014). Culminating Projects in TESL. 53.
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/tesl_etds/53
