Customer Reviews

ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This collection of short essays by various writers is an excellent survey of the everyday practical issues facing college writing center directors and tutors who work with ESL writers. The editors, Bruce and Raforth, are at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where Raforth is the writing center director.

The opening chapters on culture and language acquisition open wide the subject of culture shock faced by international students from countries where assumptions about writing, learning, research, and self-expression can be vastly different from American ones. The heart of the book focuses on a variety of aspects dealing directly with tutoring itself - getting started, reading an ESL writer's text, avoiding appropriation, helping ESL writers clarify their intended meaning, looking at the whole text, editing line by line, tutoring ESL writers online, raising questions about plagiarism, and so on. The closing chapters deal with broader issues: the role of writing in higher education abroad, the difficulty of explaining English, and a look at writing centers from the point of view of ESL students.

I found this book full of thoughtful and practical reflections on the challenges of helping ESL students master academic writing in American universities. Analysis and opinions are based on research and extend a professional discourse dating back twenty years. Altogether the book is informative and highly accessible, written in plain English, unlike much theory-driven (and often politicized) scholarship on composition and rhetoric today. I recommend it to anyone affiliated with a writing center and especially to tutors who work with ESL students. It would make a fine textbook.

This text is well researched and thoughtfully presented with regard to content and theoretical application. It is also very well written and interesting reading, even for someone who is not an ESL tutor; for anyone who might also like to learn more about teaching or communication. The best of its kind that I've read. Really excellent.