Editor’s note: We would like to thank Daniel Ooi at Abilene Christian University, Albilene (Texas), for providing this piece. If you would like to share your writing center’s experience during COVID-19, please submit via WLN.

                          Daniel Ooi

These past several months haven’t been kind to us international students: In addition to the current administration’s aggressive stance towards all forms of immigration, we must now contend with a pandemic that has impeded travel, complicated classes, threatened to bankrupt United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and stressed us new adults now stranded in a new country—at a time when even old adults are barely making it.

Mid-spring break, as the pandemic made landfall, Abilene Christian University shut down campus and moved all classes online. We’ve felt in limbo since then, feeling as though spring break never really ended. As  faculty and staff scrambled to adjust their classes and services in the wake of social distancing, our writing center director ensured a quick, seamless pivot towards online operations. We moved from synchronous in-person tutoring to asynchronous online tutoring: Students would submit digital documents for tutor feedback. Essentially, this move set us up to work primarily with writers during the revision stage and meant additional strategies would have to be employed to serve those struggling with the planning stage. Hence, we were trained in the basic features of video calling programs (such as Zoom and Google Meet) in order to accommodate writers who may specifically request for synchronous online tutoring.

At the semester’s end, we debriefed. We discovered many empathetic tutors had over-invested in their writers—spending several hours on providing feedback (occasionally to the detriment of their own academics). But more importantly, we weren’t sure whether we actually helped our international students. Could they understand our feedback? Were they able to learn in such a way as to move towards self-revision?

Asynchronous online tutoring restricts the many tools that facilitate second language acquisition—visual cues, facial expressions, tone of voice, and other nonverbal forms of communication. Feedback on a digital document means writers and tutors work off of text alone—text written in the very language ELLs are trying to learn.

Furthermore, such tutoring by nature limits communication, meaning much of tutor comments fly into a void. Rarely do we hear back from students regarding our comments. Naturally, this development left us tutors somewhat unsettled, especially with regards to ELLs. Deprived of the capability to check for understanding, we felt as if we had one shot—one text box—at explaining a compositional issue. There was little room for alternative strategies if one explanation fell through.

Of course, the general personality of international students (me included) has never made things easy for English teachers. You see, internationals—we’re a quiet bunch. We aspire to fit in. We will pretend we positively, definitely understand what “restrictive clauses” are. We worship our teachers. If pressed with “So now do you know why you can’t put a comma over here?”, we will frequently, to pay respects to the pedagogue, offer a hesitant nod—regardless of whether we actually do know. But at least for in-person tutoring, even when the writer feigns understanding out of politeness, he or she still yields visual cues such as blank stares.

Thankfully, video calling removes these obstacles. However, since it requires a writer’s access to a private space and sufficient bandwidth, our writing center chose to provide it merely as an option at the writer’s request (or the tutor’s discretion). Out of all my sessions, only one writer (who was in the planning stage) requested synchronous online tutoring. Tutoring through Google Meet actually expanded my repertoire of tools beyond what was available in traditional in-person tutoring. Screen sharing no longer became a nightmare of social politeness (as it can be in person). I could also easily share content—whether it was a link to a helpful site, a relevant quote, an article, or a file. Moreover, the chat thread itself actually functioned as a rudimentary record of our session for future reference.

But not everyone has equal access to the Internet. Hopefully, proponents of online-only schooling do not operate strictly off of the assumptions of middle-class America, relying on resources not available to people at all levels of the socioeconomic strata. We are discovering, time and again, how the pandemic disproportionately affects the most vulnerable within our communities. And as this pandemic forces writing centers to trend towards asynchronous online tutoring, the demographic most impacted will unfortunately be the ones who have most sought its services, us international students.