The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento

Are There Proof-reading Traps Regarding ESL Students?
85
Keyko Torres
Spring 2010
As writing center tutors the discussion over Lower-Order Concerns (LOCs) vs. Higher-Order Concerns
(HOCs) becomes a not very exciting one. Why? Because we are repeatedly told that though important,
our priority should not be to edit papers and just proof-read for missing commas and other sentence-level
problems. Instead we are supposed to look at the “big picture” and talk about ideas, analysis,
brainstorming…etc. first and then proof-read.
Ok I get it. Even the sign at the front desk tells students that we will not just “edit” a paper.
But what happens when an English as Second Language (ESL) student walks in, and you realize he/she
has the best ideas but cannot get them across because of sentence-level issues? What if they keep
forgetting articles, or they have fragments galore, or they confuse words and make up their own? Do we
ignore them because it is not “our job” and try to move on to “more pressing issues” that don’t exist?
Of course not, and I’m not the only one that thinks so.
Sharon Myers agrees with me in her article “Reassessing The ‘Proofreading Trap’: ESL Tutoring and
Writing Instruction.” Myers also has issues with “writing center scholars and others who view sentencelevel
revision for ESL students unethical” (219). I would find it even more unethical to expect ESL
writers to learn in the same ways or at the same rates as native writers. Thinking back to Stephen North’s
“Idea of the Writing Center,” he tells us that it our “job to produce better writer’s not better writing” (38).
Therefore we have to ask ourselves, what would make our tutee a better writer?
Myers calls for tutors’ recognition “that so-called ‘sentence-level’ errors actually involve deeper levels of
creating and processing meaning. By helping ESL students correct these errors, then, tutors can help
students gain deeper insights into English syntax – an important step in becoming better readers and
writers of the language” (219). This means that with our help in paying attention to the sentence level
errors, we will help students become better acquainted with language and its lexical and syntactic
conventions.
The problem here lies when tutors and writing center scholars refuse to see the “the depth of the
‘sentence-level’ problems involved in second-language processing” (Myers 221). It seems contradictory
to say that “sentence-level problems” are deep, but when it comes to ESL students that can be the case
because those problems may stem from their language barriers and cultural writing differences. For native
speakers, grammar is second nature; we do not have to think about the differences between the past
participle and the past imperfect, but they do. The hardest part is that sometimes they are aware of their
mistakes and they do not know how to fix them. That’s where we come in. Native writers do not need the
sentence-level editing to be a priority because if they read through their writing carefully, they will catch
their mistakes and fix them. Unfortunately, non-native writers do not have these skills and sometimes
think that they way they wrote something, although grammatically incorrect, is the correct way of doing
it.
Also, these small mistakes are a reflection of the problem they have communicating their ideas. Their
ideas might be there, but they do have the skills necessary to express them. So when to us it might seem
like their word choice is just “awkward,” it could actually be a bigger problem than anticipated. It is
important to keep this in mind and try to help them better express their ideas, because in this case their
LOC’s are their only concerns and should be treated accordingly.