Language Advising in a Research-Intensive, Multi-Disciplinary Learning Context: Critical Reflection on the Use of Advising Strategies

Albert Cleisthenes Wong, The University of Hong Kong

Wong, A. C. (2020). Language advising in a research-intensive, multi-disciplinary learning context: Critical reflection on the use of advising strategies. Relay Journal, 3(1), 48-54. https://doi.org/10.37237/relay/030104

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Editor’s Note

In this article, the author reflects on his recent advising with a particular student. The author mentions that in his early development as an advisor, he had no access to systematic training but refers to a course for a certificate in advising. He recently completed this course, which offers such training and was taught by Satoko Kato and Jo Mynard. In the course, participants learn 12 basic strategies for advising in language learning (ALL) meant to support reflective dialogue and discuss how to apply them in their individual contexts. During the course, participants have opportunities to practice these strategies and reflect on use of these skills in practice. Here, the author illustrates some of his deliberate use of these strategies employed in advising his student, drawing on the framework of the 12 strategies included in Kato and Mynard (2016) and detailed in the advisor training course. Additionally, he identifies some areas of continuing interest to him and research opportunities they might represent.

 

My journey to becoming an Advising in Language Learning (ALL) practitioner has certainly not been a linear one. As much as there is now a reasonably “clearly delineated process for learning to teach and a standard for quality teaching” (Hollins, 2011, p. 395) from which language teachers have benefited, my own training as an advisor has not followed a professional trajectory so envisioned. Systematic advisor training was not available before I was appointed to the role of language advisor. Indeed, while enjoying the work of advising, I was not readily aware of the kind of learning I would need to undertake in order to become an informed advisor that meets certain standards of practice. This certificate in advising course offered by the Research Institute for Learner Autonomy Education has been a much belated effort to challenge myself by going back to the basics. In particular, my everyday experience of offering language advising in a research-intensive English-medium university in the Hong Kong context has been challenging in that students often come with a host of discipline-specific learning needs requiring enhancement of higher-order thinking that promotes language awareness raising. Often, the learning dialogue is shaped by an attempt to negotiate and coconstruct content area knowledge through a nuanced discussion of scholarly endeavours ranging from writing dissertations and delivering conference presentations to serving as teaching assistants in tutorial sessions. This reflection on a recent advising session with a PhD student in landscape architecture focusing on reading, synthesis and thesis chapter organisation will demonstrate the importance of judiciously applying the 12 basic strategies in ALL outlined in Kato and Mynard (2016).

Advisee Profile

The advisee, to be referred to as MP, is a fourth-year PhD student in landscape architecture. She joined the University of Hong Kong with a degree from a mainland Chinese university in architecture where the medium of instruction was not English. Nevertheless, her research in the area of Buddhist influences and garden landscapes has, as she often suggests, “given her the motivation” to read and think deeply while working to understand how the Western scholarly literature expresses ideas about religion and spatial organisation in the Chinese context. Many of the ideas and concepts presented in such texts have also been translated from Chinese into English, and MP has found it hard to comprehend and write about Buddhist philosophy in the English language. A very experienced user of our language advising service, MP is adept at explaining her language needs without an explicit scaffolding dialogue. She has approached me for advice on strategies to develop essential skills for thesis, abstract and proposal writing; presentation strategies; as well as tutorial interaction techniques. At the moment, MP is working on the final chapters of her dissertation. She has found reflecting on her experience of drafting, reviewing and gaining feedback on her writing infinitely useful, and often, when she approaches me in the advising context, she is usually able to make use of reflective tools to evaluate her learning as a writer. She is a resourceful learner who takes the initiative to reflect and think deeply.

Repeating, Restating and Summarising

The strategies of repeating, restating and summarising are potentially powerful in facilitating bonding between the advisor and the advisee at the beginning of an advising session. At the start of this first session with MP in the the Spring semester of the 2019–20 academic year, I found myself often making attempts to repeat and restate what she was telling me when we were basically catching up at the beginning of the session and talking about her recent adventures as a researcher and writer. Even though such strategies may appear intuitive in many ways, it does require substantial efforts for the advisor to fully internalise and make effective use of them. She then told me how some of the experiments she did at the site of her research (in this case, a Buddhist garden in a historic city) for her analysis took much longer than she had expected and took several attempts as well, so I repeated, “Oh so you had to do it a few times?” Often, what’s being talked about at this early stage of the session need not be something fundamental to the core learning process being tackled through the dialogue between me and the advisee. However, I found it necessary to try and follow her chain of thoughts and also wanted her to feel that I was listening. When I repeated her by stressing “few,” as I felt that it must have been a huge undertaking, for instance, she was able to affirm that she noticed my expression of having felt her difficulty. She then responded by saying, “Yeah…it was tough.” I then also spontaneously took the next turn by suggesting, “Wow, I can see it must have been really challenging,” restating by rephrasing MP’s response to my discursive tactic. Overall, I found that we were able to sustain our rapport in that knowing what words and phrases to pick up enabled us to connect emotionally as advisor and advisee.

In order for the learning dialogue to proceed, it is always imperative to establish a few key goals for an advising session. During this session, MP shared a lot about her recent challenges in her research as a doctoral student. But for this particular consultation, she had something more specific about a chapter she was beginning to write. Through the dialogue where she sought to unfold a few problems she had encountered, I summarised the problems with the statement, “So you’d like to work on, first of all, structuring your paragraphs with effective thematisation, and secondly, you would like to see how far your description and evaluation of the garden sites perform synthesis adequately to reflect your understanding of the existing literature.” She was grateful that I had explicitly reminded her of synthesis, which she was not immediately able to articulate, but she did say, “I think I probably did not put the sources and my own analysis together very well.” This helped to move the dialogue forward and made it possible for her to go deeper by focusing on whether she’d integrated the sources into her writing well, for instance. I was also able to clarify whether those were the primary concerns MP was looking to seek advice on.

Empathising and Complimenting

An often overlooked set of advising strategies that I sometimes find difficult to use appropriately, emphathising and complimenting were necessary in this session to not just acknowledge difficulties encountered and praise MP for accomplishments but also to prompt her to think about what is rewarding about overcoming learning challenges. I used to be far more spontaneous in complimenting and perhaps rarely explicitly empathised, if at all, with the learner’s experience and struggles. This time, however, I believe I managed these more effectively. At the start of the session, we discussed MP’s work in the previous semester, when she submitted a paper related to her thesis. Such an endeavour required her to venture into a relatively new area of Buddhist philosophy and ideology consisting of books and articles by Western scholars that contain unfamiliar vocabulary and dense writing. In response to her celebratory remark, I was able to say that “she made it” and “received great feedback on her submission” by suggesting that she “did a very good job by learning about a new field and coming to terms with some new debates and issues while managing to write up a paper as well, and I could see how rewarding this must have been [for her].” This was a moment when I felt I had managed to truly put myself into the shoes of an advisee who had gone through a difficult journey. It was tremendously reassuring, as internally, I was also able to relate to the success myself as an early career researcher.

When MP mentioned how she was able to work on understanding translated texts of Buddhism in English by maintaining a system of collecting a bank of key phrases and definitions in her research notes, I complimented her effort by saying, “This has been quite a milestone in your research career, hasn’t it? You’ve unlocked a new talent!” This was in response to her comment that she had been more able to competently express herself in that new language of translated Buddhist ideas. I felt that it was something something that was highly crucial as a learning attempt, so I was convinced it would motivate her to try even harder. Indeed, from MP’s smile, I could tell that she felt validated, given that I had complimented her based on an outcome she herself saw significant, rather than just something trivial.

Metaview/Linking and Metaphor

One key challenge in conducting advising consultation sessions in a context like mine is that a learning dialogue may sometimes cause the advisee or advisor to go off on a tangent in discussion over something that concerns the content of a discipline with which the language advisor is simply unfamiliar. In this session with MP, it was clear that at various points in the conversation, there was a need to focus her attention on the purpose for which she had reviewed and attempted to adopt the styles of scholarly writings in Buddhist philosophy, which she did by seeking to analyse them and using some key features in her writing. Otherwise, we could easily have missed the opportunity by digressing into a discussion of how difficult and impossible it was for MP to look at complex patterns of argumentation. I indeed asked her, “So how then would the discovery of these different writing styles help you establish your own?” thereby focusing on MP’s process of exploring her own authorial inclinations as a researcher and writer seeking to enter into a community of practice.

Intuiting and the Use of Powerful Questions

Often, as an EAP teacher who also engages extensively in language advising work, I am conscious of my own tendency to rely on explicit instruction. As a dominant pedagogical imperative, it does get in my way in detecting the learner’s mode of evaluating problems and solutions. I tend to neglect the potential of an advisee to connect the dots in analysing their own situation, understanding or awareness of what they have already worked out implicitly. As a teacher, I sometimes feel the need to say, “Okay, the way to do this is…” rather than attempting, as I sought to in this session, an exploratory dialogue with MP. This dialogue was useful in helping to establish a way for MP to rely on her own sensitivity as a writer who has worked through a few dissertation chapters to see whether she can now evaluate this new one that she is drafting in terms of textual cohesion. When I saw the lack of topic statements at the beginning of each section, instead of making an evaluative judgment by remarking on the lack of summary statements, I asked her to review her work sentence-by-sentence by focusing on a short paragraph when she said that she was not very confident whether she was making sense at all: “You can see that you aren’t being upfront and explicit, right? But I think based on what you said earlier about giving readers a broader picture of your claims at the beginning, you know what you should be doing.” She was able to then come to the conclusion that she needed to reorganise the sentences to front the key theme. I was glad that I could see the relevance of this strategy here in my context with learners who are incredibly well-equipped thinkers that can develop stronger self-awareness.

After the intuiting dialogue mentioned above, I asked a few questions to help take MP through the steps towards understanding what she would need to do in order to further enhance her ability to foster critical evaluation in her writing. I was especially interested in knowing whether she would be able to carry on with her writing after the session, as she would have to continue writing independently. In response to her remark, “I think I have included too much description but not enough of my own interpretation and analysis here,” which gave me the chance to ask her what she could do to remind herself of this important observation, she was able to sketch a framework to guide her own structuring effort, showing her well-thought-out master plan: [topic summary] [elaboration] [case study and examples] [analysis and commentary] [summary statement]

Challenging, Experience Sharing and Accountability

Towards the end of the advising session, I was seeking to spell out the action items for the week which MP could then attempt as key learning activities. I was not certain, however, about precisely how I would challenge my advisee here. She was already extremely ambitious, and I was not sure whether asking her what she could do “to further enhance her repertoire of rhetorical and organisational skills” would enable her to push the envelope with her own writing efforts. I could see that she had a lot on her plate already as a fourth-year PhD student, so I only asked very mildly whether she could also try and analyse the descriptive and evaluative language used in a recently published article in her area rather than just following her own earlier chapter. Needless to say, MP quickly agreed, given her enthusiasm, but I could not help feeling that I was pushing a bit too hard when the advisee was already working hard. I told MP though that other advisees have found this to be useful when examining and evaluating their own writing, especially undergraduates with less experience in extended academic prose.

As usual, I ended the session by ensuring that there was a set of tasks to be completed before the next session. I may have found this purely procedural, given how our advising service here operates according to a cycle system where advisees attend consultation sessions in weeks 1, 3, 6, 9 and 12 or 2, 4, 7, 10 and 12 and so on. I asked MP to reiterate the learning activities we had agreed upon for the week. Very often, the list would also be sent to the advisee for action. It is clear that with highly motivated advisees like MP, this step is necessary and sufficient. For advisees who are less attuned to this approach to language advising, I would probably have made an attempt to set micro-deadlines and invited them to share their work with us through an electronic portfolio system as it is completed. Sometimes, getting students to name their own micro-deadlines by asking, “What would be a realistic time frame for this?” may be useful as well.

Concluding Remarks

As a language advisor who also plays the roles of an EAP teacher and advising service administrator, it has been a most humbling experience to enhance my skills and knowledge in Advising in Language Learning through making use of a systematic reflective framework. In particular, though this was a conscious process of making use of certain linguistic strategies in order to propel learning on the part of an advisee, it was also hugely satisfying in that the idea of an “intentional dialogue” has begun to make more meaningful sense. Despite having read Kato and Mynard (2016) on numerous occasions in professional development sessions and my own reflections, it was great to have had the opportunity to practise and gain feedback on the specific techniques with which I need to become conversant, including the ones to which I was not readily accustomed. With the ability now to evaluate my advising sessions using the analytical tools of which I have become more aware, I am in a stronger position to also advance my understanding of the practical constraints arising from specific contexts such as a research-intensive university where the objectives of learners often revolve around language and communication needs across the discipline.

Notes on the contributor

Albert Wong is a lecturer and language advisor at the Centre for Applied English Studies of the University of Hong Kong. He coordinates the General Language Advising Programme and teaches also on a wide range of EAP courses for undergraduate students of architecture, business and economics, dentistry and social sciences.

References

Hollins, E. (2010). Teacher preparation for quality teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 62(4), 395–407. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487111409415

Kato, S., & Mynard, J. (2016). Reflective dialogue: Advising in language learning. New York, NY: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315739649