Transcending

Summary

Margaret Weaver 's article Transcending Conversing : A Deaf Student in the Writing Center ' traces the learning experience of one tutor in a writing center who encountered a deaf student coming in for help . She begins by saying that writing centers rely on a social connection between tutor and tutee known as the conversation of mankind (Weaver . As Weaver comes to learn , deaf individuals converse very differently than hearing individuals

Weaver traces the steps she took to assess her deaf student 's needs in relation to writing assignments in a particular class

. She then had to ascertain how this deaf student conversed in her first language , ASL After researching , Weaver found that since ASL is a language that cannot be written , conversing in ASL is fundamentally different than conversing in English , thus posing problems with written English . Much of ASL includes communication of gesture and facial expression . Many words in English simply do not exist in ASL (Weaver

Weaver also found that the deaf often have a different center of reference for interpretation than an audist culture (Weaver . This different center of reference interfered with the student 's success in writing the way her professor expected from a hearing student . By understanding the interference of the deaf student 's first language ASL , Weaver was able to transcend ' their different centers of reference (Weaver . Therefore the problem was not writing ability , but a hearing impairment and (foreign ) language barrier Critique /Comments

Weaver 's article was a fascinating account of a mutual...