Reworking ESL Tutoring Practices

Writing styles often do not translate over cultural boundaries, and even students who are

accomplished writers in their native countries struggle with the English writing process because

of language limitations and educational backgrounds. Despite these obvious differences,

however, many writing center scholars insist that English as a Second Language (ESL) students

should be tutored the same way as Native English Speaking (NES) students. In The Allyn and

Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring, authors Paula Gillespie and Neal Lerner state that “In many ways

it’s odd to dedicate a single chapter to NNS [non-native speaking] writers—a student population

whom you’ll generally tutor just as you do native speakers!” (119) But any tutor who has worked

with ESL writers knows that these students typically come to the writing center with different

priorities than their NES peers. Although Gillespie and Lerner’s idea might sound practical, this

insistence on treating everyone the same way can lead to frustration for both tutors and students.

Refusing to recognize the fact that ESL students – while highly motivated and intelligent – may

need to be treated differently than other students in the writing center is illogical, because of the

cultural and educational differences between these groups of students. Writing center

professionals need to take the time to understand these differences in order to give ESL students

the help they need, which should involve reworking pedagogy and practice of ESL tutoring

altogether.

Perhaps the biggest debate within writing center practices is over the amount of time and

effort tutors should spend tackling higher order concerns (organization, idea and thesis

development) versus lower order concerns (grammar, sentence structure). In The Idea of a

Writing Center, Stephen North bemoans the fact that writing centers have become grammar fix-it

shops, or adopted the “‘proofreading shop in the basement’ mentality” (56). He argues that the

object of writing center instruction is to improve and change the writers, not their texts. While

this argument can be practical in most situations, in some cases – including ESL tutoring

sessions – changing the text at hand might be just as integral to the process of changing the

writer. In these cases, grammatical and sentence structure issues can obstruct meaning or prevent

the writer from saying what he or she really means to say.

Many guide books and writing center scholars – including the Allyn and Bacon Guide to

Peer Tutoring discussed above – insist that ESL students should not be treated any differently

than NES students, and discourage tutors from addressing lower order concerns. Tutors who do

chose to focus on issues like grammar are left feeling guilty about it, even if this is the type of

help ESL students really need. Neil, a writing tutor quoted in Susan Blau and John Hall’s Guilt-

Free Tutoring: Rethinking How We Tutor Non-Native-English-Speaking Students, explained his

aggravation: “It’s like being caught in a drain. I circle it and circle it, trying to avoid it, but by the

end of the session I always get sucked down into line editing.” Another instructor voiced a

similar opinion: “I screw it up every now and then. I feel guilty about it sometimes. For me, at

least, part of the guilt comes from getting these students to believe in this process and then doing

something else” (Blau 23).

It seems ironic, though, that these tutors feel guilty about helping students with

something that would otherwise be considered beneficial outside the context of the writing

center. While much of writing center pedagogy seems to indicate that HOCs should take priority

over LOCs, tutors who work with ESL papers in which lower order errors make it almost

impossible to read are, according to Blau and Hall, “caught in a bind” (35). Should they follow

accepted practice of prioritizing HOCs, or give in to ESL students’ common request for a

grammar check?

In an effort to learn more about this dilemma, Blau and Hall conducted a two-year

writing center research study to observe the interactions between tutors and ESL students. The

results indicated that in many cases – especially with students who did not have a firm grasp on

the English language – grammar and sentence structure had to be addressed line-by-line in order

for any work to be done (41). According to Blau and Hall, completely separating higher and

lower order concerns was not always practical. As a solution, they suggest that instead of strictly

adhering to the rules advocated by authors like North, Gillespie and Lerner, tutors should find a

middle ground when working with ESL students – to interweave the discussion of higher and

lower order concerns (41). When working with students whose grammatical and structural issues

really do prevent them from saying what they mean, Blau and Hall suggest reading through the

paper one sentence or paragraph at a time, to figure out how to untangle their actual meaning. In

cases like this, it is the tutor’s job to determine the best way to handle the session (40). Often,

ESL students are more concerned with fixing lower order concerns, because this is what their

professors sent them to the writing center for. The students may be hesitant to work on larger

issues until they can get through at least some of these other concerns. But this process is not to

be confused with traditional “line-editing,” in which tutors risk taking over ownership of

students’ papers (42). Rather, it is a balanced focus on clarity and sentence structure based on

how these issues affect meaning. This can be time consuming, and might even require multiple

sessions. But the end result is a clearer, more structured paper that both the student and the tutor

can understand, and hopefully the student will learn from.

This approach of interweaving HOCs and LOCs should be incorporated into ESL tutoring

pedagogy. It is commonly thought that when an ESL student asks a tutor to check grammar,

there are often more issues at play, and “grammar” is used as an umbrella term to lump together

all of their concerns. While it may be true that these lower order grammar concerns are not the

biggest issue in a student’s paper, it cannot be assumed that this is always the case. It also does

not mean that these LOCs should, as a rule, be ignored in favor of HOCs. Furthermore, Blau and

Hall’s research shows that these issues do not have to be separated completely, but can be

tackled simultaneously during a session. This may be a bit more time consuming, but will

ultimately improve both the writers and their papers.

Sharon A. Myers also discusses the issue of higher versus lower order concerns in

Reassessing the “Proofreading Trap:” ESL Tutoring and Writing Instruction. She argues that

tutors who avoid lower order concerns, such as word order and pluralization, are doing a great

disservice to their students. Problems with grammar should not be brushed aside, because they

prevent ESL students from being able to express themselves accurately (Myers 52). Learning

sentence structure is integral to mastering a language. Ignoring this concern does a disservice to

ESL students and native speakers alike. Myers explains that “in the case of ESL students, whose

greatest and most consistent difficulties are badly manifested in the boundaries of the sentence

itself, it seems like an eerie kind of denial” (54).

According to Myers, the reason that students might continue to make these errors even

after having studied English for several years is because these “simple” errors – such as

pluralization and article usage – are not as simple as they seem to native speakers. Such errors

can often be signs of much more complex language problems. While it is useful to distinguish

between these two types of errors, Myers argues that textbook definitions are not always

practical. Identifying the significance of such errors depends on the student and the context in

which he or she is writing (62).

In addition to changing the way tutors view the “ideal” tutoring session when it comes to

lower versus higher order concerns, it is also necessary to reevaluate what the term “good

writing” really means. It is extremely difficult master a foreign language, and it takes much more

than a few tutoring sessions for ESL students to write the same way native speakers do. But this

difference in writing style certainly does not detract from the ideas they present in their writing.

Therefore, tutors need to adopt a broader definition of “good writing.” Paul Kei Matsuda and

Michelle Cox discuss this idea in their article Reading an ESL Writer’s Text. According to

Matsuda and Cox, many tutors feel the need to help ESL students assimilate into the writing

style of a native speaking student. In most cases, however, this goal is neither realistic nor

practical. Tutors should not seek to change ESL students’ writing style to the point where it is

indistinguishable from that of an NES student. Rather, Matsuda and Cox are part of a growing

group of writing center professionals that encourage tutors to let students maintain their original

voice.

According to Ilona Leki, author of Understanding ESL Writers, the goal of making ESL

writing identical to that of native speakers is unrealistic. Leki advocates the idea that “beyond a

certain level of proficiency in English writing, it is not the students’ texts that need to change;

rather it is the native-speaking readers and evaluators … that need to learn to read more broadly,

with a more cosmopolitan and less parochial eye” (Leki 132). Provided that the writers’ ideas are

concrete and the text’s meaning is clear and organized, it is ok to let ESL students maintain their

original voices, even if certain aspects of their writing style differs from that of their NES peers.

Writing centers need to adopt this idea in order to focus on genuine improvement rather than

assimilation. With this new goal in mind, tutors can still tackle both HOCs and LOCs (as

advocated by Blau and Hall), but not with the mindset that the result should yield drastic changes

to the student’s voice, and the text is no longer the student’s original work.

Some writing center professionals, like Carol Severino, take a more extreme stance with

this issue. Matsuda and Cox’s article cites Severino’s account of a session with an ESL student

named Michael. Michael’s paper was filled with errors, and Severino felt tempted to make

tremendous adjustments to his writing. But she resisted the urge to correct his errors in order to

remain consistent with writing center pedagogy. Severino explains that she “responded to his

piece as an act of communication, which it was, rather than as a demonstration of how well

Michael knew and could apply the rules (Severino 194).”

While this sounds nice in theory, one might question how much Michael actually

benefitted from Severino’s extremely hands-off approach. Severino certainly allowed the student

to maintain his own writing style, but how much did he really learn? As explained above in the

articles by Blau, Hall and Myers, grammar should not be completely forgotten during a tutoring

session, especially when these errors are so severe that they become distracting and obstruct

meaning. Furthermore, some professors might base grades on poor grammar and inability to

construct sentences properly – even if the ideas the student is presenting are accurate – if these

issues make texts extremely difficult to read. Writing center professionals need to advocate

finding a middle ground between taking over the text by line editing and remaining completely

detached from the grammar and mechanics of the text, which leaves it – in some cases –

unintelligible.

Besides adhering less to the accepted writing center ideas of HOCs and LOCs, it is also

important to understand how cultural differences can influence ESL students’ learning styles.

While it may seem customary in an American university setting, the practice of question asking

during a tutoring session is confusing for students from certain cultures. In Cultural Conflicts in

the Writing Center: Expectations and Assumptions of ESL Students, Muriel Harris discusses how

challenging this can be for some ESL students. Harris surveyed international students in the

writing center, and found that in many of their home countries, students are expected to listen

silently and copy down what the teacher is lecturing about. Asking questions in class is not an

option, and teachers are seen as authority figures that deserve high respect. This differs from the

American approach to classroom learning, which is much more interactive and informal (Harris

195). Fortunately, many of the students that Harris surveyed viewed writing tutors as a step

below teachers, which made them more approachable and receptive to questions (193). What the

students did not expect, however, was that the tutors would be doing just as much question

asking. Since these students consider tutors the authority, they expect them to supply the

answers; they might wait patiently for a response – not out of laziness or because they do not

have an answer, but out of respect for the tutor’s knowledge and authority. Harris explains that

“There is a cross-cultural problem in the clash between ESL students who sit with pencil poised,

waiting to write down what we tell them, and us, as we keep trying to return responsibility for

revision to the writer” (195).

For this question asking method to work for ESL students in this position, tutors and

students need to work together to establish the fact that the writing center is a place for active

learning and collaboration. Tutors should not assume that “making the students do all the work,”

as advocated by Jeff Brooks in Minimalist Tutoring, will always be beneficial. But tutors can

find ways to restructure the tutoring session to make it more beneficial for both parties, like

thinking of ways to rephrase questions that encourage more of a dialogue between the tutor and

the student. Tutors can bridge the cultural gap by outlining the expectations at the beginning of a

session. They can make it clear that the students should not be afraid to participate and become

active learners, even if it is not what they are used to doing in an educational setting. From an

American perspective, tutors are not there to give away answers, and it can be frustrating when

ESL students expect this in a session. But understanding the differences and learning how to

clarify expectations during a session can help bridge the gap and ease these frustrations. Harris

explains that “If we want to break this mold, we need to backtrack and address the differences, to

think about how to help the student adopt a mode of learning that can seem foreign and difficult

at first – even impolite and disrespectful” (195). Then as they continue to work with tutors in the

writing center, this process of question asking might become more natural, and students are

likely to become more receptive to this structure. While practice will probably not change a

student’s learning style permanently, it can help them understand how and why the tutoring

session goes the way it does, and can help them feel more comfortable in an American

educational setting.

Another problem in the question asking process arises when tutors ask open-ended, or

Socratic questions, to help students find their own answers. This assumes that both parties

understand the expectation of collaboration during the tutoring session. As Harris explained, this

is not always the case. Although tutors are encouraged to use this practice rather than providing

students with the correct answer, Blau and Hall argue that this practice can often be impractical

when working with ESL students. Socratic questioning works if there can be multiple answers,

or if the tutor is genuinely trying to get a better grasp of what the student is saying. But asking

the wrong types of questions can be misleading. If the question has to do with sentence structure,

word choice or grammar – something that only has one concrete answer – this process is not

effective for ESL students still struggling to learn the language. Blau and Hall’s research study

yielded several examples like the following (in which the tutor is trying to help the ESL student

figure out how to use the phrase “ask for directions”):

T: You’re missing a word. How to ask …C: The?T: How to ask …C: A?T: Nope.C: How to ask directions.T: For directions.C: How to ask? (laughs)T: For directions.C: For directions. (Blau 33)

The student eventually supplied the right answer, but only through guessing. And even though

the answer is correct, the student might not understand exactly why. But if the tutor instead

supplies the answer from the start instead of waiting for the student to guess, and then takes the

time to make sure he or she understands it, then the student can actually learn something from

the experience. Tutors would be better off being directive in this situation, instead of taking up

time with a guessing game in a failed attempt to collaborate. Socratic questioning can be

beneficial in some situations, especially with native speakers, when a tutor wants to challenge a

student to think more critically. But the example above illustrates that this method does not cross

cultural boundaries under certain circumstances. In this case, ESL students would benefit much

more from directiveness. Blau and Hall explain that, in this situation, “there’s nothing wrong

with being directive and to the point when explaining a local error related to idioms, mechanics,

or grammar” (34). This is a prime example to illustrate how cultural differences influence a

student’s receptiveness to certain tutoring styles, and it shows how impractical it is for writing

center professionals like Gillespie and Lerner to insist that ESL students be tutored in the same

way as NES students.

In addition, it is important not to undervalue a tutor’s role as cultural informant. Learning

about how ESL students viewed education and the writing process in their native countries is

essential for tutors to understand how they can best serve ESL students. For example, the idea of

a thesis statement at the beginning of an essay is completely foreign to students from certain

cultural backgrounds. In The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning

English Composition, Fan Shen reflects on his experiences as an ESL college student. The values

and writing style that he learned in an American university were vastly different than what he

had learned in China, his native country. Shen explains that “learning the rules of English

composition is, to a certain extent, learning the values of Anglo-American society. In writing

classes in the United States I found that I had to re-program my mind, to redefine some of the

basic concepts and values that I had about myself” (Shen 460). He goes on to explain how the

concept of a topic sentence at the beginning of an essay – which seems to embody the values of

fast-paced American society – is completely different from the standard Chinese way of writing,

in which the writer can include several pages before getting to the main idea (462).

Blau and Hall also identified this problem throughout their research. The following

transcript from a tutoring session shows how integral this cultural exchange is during a tutoring

session:

T: This phrase right here, as it’s written down, doesn’t tell me anything really … It’s not telling me what your main topic is, what your point is.C: So its basis is to just say what I want to say?T: Exactly, exactly. Especially for an American audience, you want to be as … specific, and get out and say your point as quickly and succinctly as possible. And I know that culturally it’s difficult sometimes. But you have to sort of assume that Americans are dumb (laughs) (Blau 30).

Although it seems like a simple conversation, this is a valuable exchange of cultural knowledge.

The tutor is helping the student learn how to navigate through the structure of an American-style

essay. This tutor knows not to assume that ESL students have ever been exposed to the concepts

(i.e. thesis statement, 5-paragraph essay) that American students have been learning since middle

school. Writing center pedagogy should address this issue, so that tutors can understand how

different cultures might approach academic writing in completely different ways. With this in

mind, tutors can pay attention to different things that we would normally gloss over with NES

students. This further goes to show that ESL students cannot be treated the same way as NES

students, because cultural differences are much deeper than what meet the eye.

Based on the evidence presented in this essay, it is time for writing center professionals to

acknowledge the fact that tutors need to adopt different strategies for working with ESL students.

Despite what authors like Gillespie and Lerner claim, it is illogical to insist on using the same

methods for both ESL and NES students. Each group comes to the writing center with different

concerns based on their cultural and educational backgrounds, and it is unreasonable to dismiss

these concerns on the basis that tutors should “stick to the books” of writing center pedagogy. In

reality, no two tutoring sessions are alike, so why should tutoring techniques have to fit a certain

mold, based on the way NES students behave during a tutoring session? Changing the way tutors

address HOCs and LOCs, practice question asking, define “good writing,” and act as cultural

informants will decrease the frustrations that lack of cultural understanding can cause in the

writing center. More importantly, it will allow writing centers can give ESL students the type of

help that fits their learning needs, ultimately creating better, more confident writers.

Works Cited

Blau, Susan and John Hall. “Guilt Free Tutoring: Rethinking How We Tutor Non-Native-

English-Speaking Students.” The Writing Center Journal. 23.1 (2002): 23-44. Online.

<http://cfder.org/uploads/3/0/4/9/3049955/guilt_free_tutoring_rethinking_how_we_tutor

_non_english_speaking_students.pdf>

Brooks, Jeff. “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work.” 128-132 Print. The

Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice. (2001): 219-224. Rpt. in

The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. 4th ed. Ed. Christina Murphy and Steve

Sherwood. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2008. 128-132. Print.

Cox, Michelle and Paul Kei Matsuda. “Reading an ESL Writer’s Text.” Studies in Self-Access

Learning Journal. 2.1 (2011): 4-14 Online.

<http://sisaljournal.org/archives/mar11/matsuda_cox/>

Harris, Muriel. Affirming Diversity: “Cultural Conflicts in the Writing Center: Expectations and

Assumptions of ESL Students.” Writing in Multicultural Settings. (1997): 220-233. Rpt.

in The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. 4th ed. Ed. Christina Murphy and

Steve Sherwood. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2008. 190-202. Print.

North, Steven. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English 46 (1984): 433-46. Rpt. in The

St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. 4th ed. Ed. Christina Murphy and Steve

Sherwood. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2008. 44-58. Print.

Shen, Fan. “The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English

Composition.” National Council of Teachers of English. 40.4 (1989): 459-466. Online.

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/358245.pdf?acceptTC=true&>