For Clarification

Reading over my tutors-in-training blog posts this week, it strikes me that they're getting the wrong impression from our readings out of ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors that I or the authors we're reading somehow want to paint ESL clients as "lacking." I want to work against this assumption; I want my tutors to understand that ESL clients have many of the same needs and problems as NES clients, but because ESL clients are acquiring a second language and, in the case of international students, coming from a different culture, they're going to face challenges - and present challenges to their tutors - that NES clients don't.

In class, we're watching the documentary "Writing Across Borders." What I'd like my tutors to take away from class next week, and from their assigned blog posts this week, is the realization that our assumptions about what good writing is are culturally-constructed. I think this is an essential component of effective ESL tutoring. It takes us beyond the assimilationist/accomodationist/separatist stance and pushes us to recognize the inherently social nature of genre. Our conventions for organization, development, focus, syntax, even metaphor and argument are not "innocent" or "natural." They are shaped by social conventions, by cultural expectations, not only American but also academic and discipline-specific.

Just as we, as tutors, come to the writing center session with cultural expectations for what good writing is, so too do our clients. In knowing more about our own cultural construction of writing, we are better placed to figure out where/when an ESL client may be bringing cultural assumptions to her or his writing, and that gives us a place to intervene - not by insisting that the client "Americanize" her or his writing, but by talking with the client about the cultural expectations that contribute to the way she or he writes.