As a tutor, you will be working in a variety of different appointment modalities and situations, and as such you will need a range of strategies to be effective at your work.

Synchronous appointments allow tutors to collaborate with writers in real time at any stage of the writing process and on any type of writing. Synchronous appointments are conversations grounded in collaboration, respect, and revision. They manifest our core beliefs that collaboration among peers is an effective mode of learning and that all writers benefit from sharing work in progress and receiving feedback.

Asynchronous Appointment Strategies

Asynchronous appointments allow tutors to collaborate with writers at any stage of the writing process and on any type of writing without having to be in person. These appointments are grounded in collaboration, respect, and revision. They manifest our core beliefs that collaboration among peers is an effective mode of learning and that all writers benefit from sharing work in progress and receiving feedback by providing reflection and revision-based feedback.

🌏 EAL Writers

Appointment Strategies: EAL Writers

At the Writing Center, you can expect to work with writers of a variety of linguistic backgrounds including international student writers, recent immigrants, and what some call Generation 1.5—writers who were born in the U.S. but whose first language is not English. You can also expect to work with students in DePaul’s English Language Academy.

Note that most Writing Center materials use the term EAL (English as an additional language) to refer to writers whose first language is not English. While other terms like ESL (English as a second language) or ELL (English Language Learner) may be accurate in some contexts, we prefer EAL as an umbrella term for writers who learned English as an additional language but have varying levels of English proficiency, may or may not be actively involved in formal English education, and have diverse linguistic backgrounds in general.

Moreover, remember that multilingual does not always equate to multiliterate: Some writers might speak multiple languages but don’t necessarily have reading or writing experiences in multiple languages. In other words, there is a huge range of language and writing needs that EAL writers might come with, and all of these factors will affect the approaches you’ll use as a tutor. Keep this in mind as you go through the guide.

🤝 Linguistic Justice

Strategies for Enacting Linguistic Justice

Because literacy practices and literacy learning are products of a culture’s history and values—and a force for shaping a culture’s future—writing is unavoidably and necessarily a site of ideological production. People with power and influence to shape what matters in social contexts have historically decided how we write, what we write, and how we judge writing.