Steven M. Sandberg and Dr. Penny Bird, English

Background

The purpose of this study was to assess the need for an established service at Brigham Young University (BYU) to assist non-native speakers of English with revisions of their papers. The study relied on the assumption that effective, writing-process learning only occurs at the point of need—the draft stages—and not after a final grade has been given. The excellent grammar resources of other language departments and the non-credit English Language Center (ELC), and the frequently overcrowded grammar resources at the Reading/Writing Center (R/WC), prompted the idea of creating an English Grammar Lab at the R/WC.

Methodology

A survey was carefully prepared to assess the need for an English Grammar Lab at the R/WC. It was revised by the ESL tutors and the R/WC director to correspond with current ESL-tutorial concerns and to avoid both the question-ordering and the response-set biases. The Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects approved the survey, and it was distributed to thirty-one English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students who use the R/WC at BYU. The survey was issued from March 22 through April 13, 1999, and again from April 28 through June 14, 1999. The R/WC secretary distributed and collected all of the surveys. Originally, the survey was to be distributed to other locations at BYU, such as the Multi-Cultural Tutoring Lab and the International Admissions Office, in order to obtain a wider sampling, but these institutions generally serve native English speakers and do not work principally with writing. The other statistics cited in this report came from data compiled by the R/WC.

Results

According to the results of the survey, there is a crucial need for a Grammar Lab on campus. Since the R/WC mainly focuses on macro-level revisions, the responding students voiced their concerns about the inadequate micro-level resources, such as grammar help, available to them. Nineteen of the thirty-one respondents ranked grammar as either the most difficult or second-most difficult part of the writing process. When asked to evaluate several statements about their reading and writing skills and about the R/WC, the students responded on a scale of one to five. Several representative statements are listed below with the average and the mode responses:

I am confident when I write in English—2.84; 3 (no one marked a 5 on this statement).

I am confident when I write in my native language—4.29; 5.

If the Writing Center had more grammar tutors, I would use them for my papers—4.42; 5.

I think BYU has adequate resources to help me improve my writing in English—3.61; 3.

In addition, fourteen of the thirty-one students answered the open-ended question, “Do you have any other suggestions for an English Grammar Lab?” with a plea for either longer hours or more ESL tutors to help them with their papers.

Two other open-ended questions on the survey and the responses they elicited are representative of the entire survey:

What do you feel you need the most help on in writing?

“Getting a feel for grammar.”
“Organization of ideas, GRAMMAR, and word choice” (original emphasis).
“Grammar, use of ‘the,’ ‘and,’ ‘a’ and so forth.”
“To improve my organization of English sentence, and to correctly use grammar.”

Do you have any other suggestions for an English Grammar Lab?

“Because for a ESL student, using correcting grammar is a hard work, sometimes I
can’t find what is my mistakes.”
“Late hours.”
“Please have more than 2 tutors!!”
“It would be very nice and helpful if you had more ESL tutors.”

Conclusion

Admittedly, the survey results are not conclusive evidence that every ESL student at BYU feels the need for an English Grammar Lab since the only students surveyed were ones who already come to the R/WC for help with their papers and who have to deal with the overcrowding problems at the end of each term or semester. However, of the 4,185 total tutorials the R/WC gave last Winter Semester, 385 were ESL tutorials—slightly under ten percent of the total tutorials given. Current funding levels only allow for two part-time ESL tutors, since their pay must come out of the total R/WC budget and hiring additional ESL tutors, graduate students at substantially higher wages, restricts the R/WC’s ability to meet the current demand for traditional tutors. The ESL tutors’ hours come to much less than ten percent of the total hours worked by all R/WC tutors, which is further compounded by the unusually-long time requirement for ESL tutorials: on average, ESL tutorials take twice as long as a normal tutorial. The ESL students at BYU need a convenient English grammar resource with longer hours and more available tutors.

Ideally, in order to meet the needs of ESL students, the University needs to provide an ESL Grammar Lab, either by designating funding to the R/WC or by setting up an independent resource. The obvious answer is for BYU to provide funding for an English Grammar Lab, which would be run out of the Reading room of the R/WC. An independent resource would not be cost-effective or practical, since it would require additional administrative personnel and would physically separate ESL writers from English-speaking writers, further widening the gap the R/WC is striving to bridge. Another possible but problematic alternative would be for BYU’s Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Program to require its participants to intern at the R/WC. Tutoring internships could be instituted as part of the TESOL certification requirements or integrated into the class syllabi of Linguistics 577 or other related classes, and correlated with Penny Bird, the R/WC Director. This option would not require additional funding and would supply ESL tutors to meet the demand at the R/WC, but would not provide the continuity needed to establish an effective English Grammar Lab. Besides, the TESOL program already requires time-demanding internships at the ELC, and further time requirements would overwhelm students seeking their TESOL certificates. The proposed English Grammar Lab in the R/WC would alleviate continuity problems and would effectively serve the ESL students at BYU.