The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento

Approaching ChE Writers
Probably the most important suggestion I can make about approaching ChE writers is to treat them
as non-SAE speakers rather than as ESL students. The main reason I say this is because ChE students are
not learning English, they know English, but they may still need to learn how to translate their writing
into SAE for the sake of completing academic papers. Dialect translation is not an easy skill to learn, but
it can be encouraged by asking ChE writers to work on editing their own work, comparing their sentence
structure to the SAE version of the same sentence, and by identifying and naming their individual usage
trends so that they can learn to identify their own. The main goal should be to address their usage trends
in the context of their writing rather than as singular grammar problems to be attacked through drills and
endless usage jargon ala “you’re devoicing your consonants”.
A final suggestion I will make about ChE writers is on how to identify them and differentiate them
from ESL students. These are not iron-clad rules, but consider the possibility that you are working with a
ChE writer if:
• He doesn’t speak Spanish
• He can’t write in Spanish
• While he knows Spanish and even if it is his first language, most of his schooling happened
in the United States
• She grew up in an enclave where ChE is a dominant dialect of English.
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