Tutors as Teachers: Assisting ESL/EFL Students in the Writing Center

Abstract

In The Idea of a Writing Center, Stephen M. North takes task his colleagues in university English departments for their unenlightened views: For them, a writing center is illiteracy what a cross between Lourdes and a hospice would be serious illness...(435). In the nineties when multiculturalism is all the rage and American universities attract larger and larger numbers of international students. North and his kind may need take on a different Goliath. Now that we've overcome the idea of writing centers as the proofreading-shop [s]-in-the basement (North 444), we may need battle the idea of writing centers as sentence-scrubbers-for-foreignstudents as my colleague Ray Smith says. But if the writing center does not exist merely to serve, supplement, back up, complement, reinforce, or otherwise be defined by any external curriculum (North 440), how is it ever become a place where non-native writers can receive remediation and guidance? What changes will have be made in the philosophy of the writing center and in the job descriptions of tutors? Anyone who has worked in a college writing center for any length of time will know the plight of international students who have demonstrated some level of English proficiency by achieving a requisite score on a discrete-item grammar and vocabulary test such as the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). However, scores (enough get in the door) do not always translate into satisfactory academic writing (enough leave with a diploma in hand). As undergraduates, these students join