Reassessing the "Proofreading Trap": ESL Tutoring and Writing Instruction

Abstract

ESL writers present a common dilemma to writing centers-the desire for sentencelevel interventions from their tutors.Our staff often experience such interventions as contradicting the aim of writing centers, formulated by Stephen North as making "sure that writers, and not necessarily their texts, are what get changed by instruction" (438).The job of writing center tutors, North stated, "is to produce better writers, not better writing" (438).The sentence -level demands of ESL students, however, are seen as "editing."Eric Hobson expresses this attitude in an article about writing center pedagogy in which he complains that during the period between the late 70s and early 80s, writing courses dealt with writing (e.g., invention, drafting, revision, development of authors' voices, etc.) while writing center staff were allocated the demanding and ethically questionable task of "cleaning up" writers' editing skills, of eradicating minority dialects . . .and of "dealing with" non-native writers.(155-166) It is easy to understand why, faced with cutting through the confused syntactic and lexical tangles entwined in the sentences of second -language texts, writing specialists might much prefer to discuss issues of content and organization.Giving students correct grammar or more appropriate vocabulary is perceived as "fixing" the paper, something understood to violate the autonomy of the writer and the integrity of the work's authorship.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 40 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.