ESL Student Participation in Writing Center Sessions

Abstract

Speaking Students," an article appearing nine years after Power's endorsement of a "more direct, more didactic" approach (41), Blau and Hall offer guidelines that affirm flexible priorities and the role of direct tutoring strategies. In the sessions analyzed in their study, directness proved helpful to meeting the ESL students' need for cultural information and for avoiding the related tendency for Socratic questioning to deteriorate into "trolling for the right answer" (33). Another notable finding was that line-by-line sentence-level tutoring tended to lead beyond surfacelevel errors to discussions of meaning and thus to the resolution of the frequently noted conflict between the agendas of ESL learners, eager for error correction (35; see also Harris and Silva 530-531) and the agendas of tutors, who are typically trained to focus first on whole-essay concerns. From these findings, Blau and Hall conclude that tutors should "be comfortable with the directive approach, especially with local concerns such as grammar, punctuation, idioms, and word usage," and with "working line-by-line" (42). They emphasize that their guidelines are not rules (43) and that tutors who find themselves "editing" have gone too far with the directive approach (41). However, they also suggest the unlikelihood that teachers and tutors would fall into the role of editor: "No good writing teacher would correct students' errors for them or appropriate their texts. Perhaps the true distinction here is between editing and teaching, rather than between directive and non-directive" (24-25).