• Corpus ID: 151061363

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

@article{Thonus1993TutorsAT,
  title={Tutors as Teachers: Assisting ESL/EFL Students in the Writing Center.},
  author={Terese Thonus},
  journal={Writing Center Journal},
  year={1993},
  volume={13},
  pages={13-26}
}

• Terese Thonus
• Published 1993
• Education
• Writing Center Journal

In "The Idea of a Writing Center," Stephen M. North takes to task his colleagues in university English departments for their unenlightened views: "For them, a writing center is to illiteracy what a cross between Lourdes and a hospice would be to 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 to 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 to 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 to become a place where non-native writers can receive remediation and guidance? What changes will have to 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, "satisfactory scores" (enough to get in the door) do not always translate into satisfactory academic writing (enough to leave with a diploma in hand). As undergraduates, these students join