I just came across this article called Cultural Conflicts in the Writing Center: Expectations and Assumptions of ESL Students by Muriel Harris, and it is blowing my mind. I know we've discussed this some, and we may have even read it, but it's just now really sinking in with me that ESL writers may not respond to open-ended and leading questions for cultural reasons! A lot of times, I get frustrated, and wonder if the writer just doesn't... think on a higher level. But no, Laura. Oh no, no, no. First of all, their perceptions of what a tutor does are flat out the opposite of what we're taught to do, and it's contra-cultural for them to be informal like we expect. (Okay, yes, these are sweeping generalizations... but Harris gave a mass amount of ESL students a lengthy questionnaire, and these are the generalizations she's making from that.)
So, really, the problem has just been opposing perceptions of what the session should be like! Aha! And this is sort of the afterthought resolution to some of my losses... though it's not doing those writers any good. But now I think I'll have more understanding in the future.
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And now the article right after that is calling my name, but I'll have to save it for later because I don't think I really need it for my project (and if I read everything that looked interesting when doing research.. well.. I may have completed very few projects). But anyway, Sharon A. Myers' Reassessing The "Proofreading Trap": ESL Tutoring and Writing Instruction, and its abstract (or summary.. or something) says that helping students correct "sentence-level" errors (as opposed to focusing on those HOCs) is good and should be done because it's a huge part of learning the language. And I always felt kinda.. guilty for just working on these kinds of errors.
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