ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors

Hey everyone! In my downtime I read an article titled "ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors" by Cynthia Linville. I found this article to be pretty interesting. It gave a scenario of a writing consultant who was tutoring an ESL student. The student came to the writing center because he wanted the tutor to fix the errors in his paper so that he would get a passing grade. This is a lot like what we have been talking about with students e-mailing us their papers so that we can "fix" them and how people tend to view writing centers as basic fix it shops. Anyway, this articles goes on to talk about tips that writing consultants can benefit from when working with an ESL student. It says that we need to let the student know that we aren't going to just focus on lower order concerns, but we will address them when necessary. We, as consultants, need to be patient and help any student we are working with. The author states that it helps to take an ESL students paper and just go line by line to help them with sentence structure and verb agreement. This helps the student pinpoint exact places in their paper where they may be having difficulty. Even though at times it may be hard, we should try and avoid making corrections for them, they need to learn from their mistakes so they can correct them in the future. This will help students to become better writers. Our focus is to make every student a better writer rather than making better papers. I think this was a great article to read. It brought out existing points that I had previously learned and it also enlightened me with new information. At the end of the article the author gave some links to helpful websites. Here is one that I will share with you: http://a4esl.org/q/h/grammar.html