Noreen Lape, director of the Writing Program, and Lucile Duperron, associate Professor of French, started off the FaculTea lecture series. On Oct. 2 in the BiblioCafé, Lape and Duperron presented “The International Work of Composition: The Development of a Multilingual Writing Center at Home and Abroad.” This series of lectures is sponsored by the library staff, and is meant to be a way for faculty and students to interact in a more casual setting over delicious refreshments and wine for those of age.

Lape began by explaining the Dickinson’s Multilingual Writing Center’s (MWC) set up. Other institutions have specific world language departments that provide tutors in their language, but Dickinson’s model is unique because all of our language departments work together to create the MWC.

The MWC currently offers tutors in 11 languages and is located in the Waidner-Spahr library. Lape has an article coming out this fall to further explain the Collaborative Government Structure of the MWC, which includes a committee composed of members of the language departments to pick the tutors.

Currently, Lape is researching a phenomenon called “cultural writing shock” that many students experience while studying abroad. She is interviewing students to discover how “good writing shifts between cultures,” and what would be helpful for future students to know before they go abroad and are thrown into a different cultural writing style.

Duperron then expressed the need for intervention to help prepare students for alternative writing styles and thus diminish writing culture shock. She is working to create a Writing Center similar to our MWC in Toulouse for the study abroad program. However, the English to French translation is hindering the process.

The French tutoring model is very individualized and direct, and when American students often feel like they, or their writing, are being criticized instead of being shown how to improve when presented this style. Additionally, the word tutor in French, “tuteur,” has a very different connotation than in English. One of the professors in Toulouse that Duperron has contacted to help with the Writing Center said that a tuteur has a very negative undertone – literally, “someone that works in the shadows.” This makes finding people willing to be tutors very difficult. The goals of the Writing Center need to be explained in much further detail than simply “students and interns tutor other students to improve their writing” in order to convey a similar meaning.