Susan Sparks's Guilt Free Tutoring

Thousands of people from around the world immigrate to America for many reasons, like wanting to start a new life with their families or fleeing from persecution. Because of this, there are many children who speak only a little bit of English or children who speak no English. Many of these children learn how to speak near perfect English in school, but do not know how to write in proper English because teachers do not focus as much on this aspect. These children eventually grow up and go to college. They are then left with a difficult task of constantly writing proper essays in proper English. Many of them end up in the Writing Center for help, but the tutors are put into the challenging position of deciphering their essays and helping them

with it. Researchers have come up with numerous ways of tutoring NNES students. In the four essays that I read I found that the method described in the "Guilt -Free Tutoring" article to be the easiest and most effective for me.
"Guilt-Free Tutoring" describes the difficulties tutor encounter when helping NNEs students with their essays and ways to overcome these problems.

Many tutors feel the need to tutor all students the same way because of the guidelines that are set up for tutors to follow, but then they feel guilty about making an exception for NNES students. Most tutors end up fixing NNES student's local concerns first, instead of focusing on the global concerns and then feel bad about it. Susan Blau, John Hall, and Sarah Sparks introduce in their article, "Guilt-Free Tutoring," a new method of tutoring NNES students. These new guidelines include tutors having a "practical grounding in contrastive rhetoric," being "prepared to be a cultural informant [and] writing consultant," being "comfortable using a directive approach, especially with local concerns," being "comfortable working line-by-line through a paper," as well as interweaving "global and local concerns rather than prioritizing them" (Blau, Hall, and Sparks 42). These methods are supposed to help tutors effectively guide NNES with their essays and writing later

on.
The article thoroughly explains how each part in the guidelines will help the tutor and the student have a more effective and less awkward session. I like all of the guidelines in the article, but there are parts of it that will prove to be more helpful than other parts like being direct with the local concerns. The main method used for NES is to ask open-ended questions about an error or concern even with local concerns, but with NNES students this method has proven to be difficult and annoying. In the article, the authors suggest that a tutor should be forthcoming and just tell them the problem and how to correct it. I would definitely use this approach to avoid an awkward and meaningless session. Another important part is interweaving both local concerns and global concerns as you go line by line in their essay. By addressing local concerns that could be making it difficult to see the global concerns you’re helping them with their essay while making it easier for you to see and address their global concerns. The methods in this article can be beneficial for both tutors and students alike.
Institutions that do not offer ESL programs often encounter problems with nonnative speakers writing assignments. Instructors will send their nonnative students to the writing center with a list of problems for them to work on and they expect the tutors to work miracles in a short amount of time. The writing center staff deal skillfully with nonnative writers' concerns "by becoming aware of the role of English in the world today, the expectations of the academic audience, and some current trends and techniques in the ESL writing pedagogy" (Thonus 14). The standards of English are becoming very complex even among native speakers making it difficult for ESL and EFL students to learn how to write in it. So researchers came up with several comprehensive theories to help ESL/EFL students. "The four most popular (writing pedagogy) approaches (…) are controlled composition, current-traditional rhetoric, the process approach, and English for academies purposes" (Thonus 16). Terese Thonus collapsed these four categories into three: "1) focus on form (controlled composition and contrastive rhetoric); 2) focus on the writer (negotiation of meaning and the process approach); and 3) focus on the reader (English for academic purposes and the academic discourse community)" (Thonus 16). The focus on the form category is when the tutor points out the difference between the students' writing, which is influenced by their native language, and English standards. The tutor informs the student of English standards in writing. The focus on the writer category is when the tutor focuses on the structure then grammar. The focus on the reader category is when the tutor helps the student understand the audience they are trying to address. Thonus points out that tutors "need to understand the challenges that even advanced nonnative speakers face in writing English and put this understanding to work in (their) conferences" (Thonus 22).
In this article, Thonus focuses on three categories of tutoring an ESL/EFL student. All of the approaches are very different from each other. In my opinion, the focus on the form approach is the most effective one because the tutor is embracing their cultural background making them more comfortable. The student doesn't have to feel like they are failures because they can't produce perfect English essays. This helps the student realize some of the cultural differences in their writing which will help them in their future essays. The next approach, focus on the writer, is more of a difficult approach for both the student and the tutor because the tutors are treating the student as they would a native speaker, who has a better grasp of the English language than ESL/EFL students, which allows the native student to get more out of their sessions. Another difficulty is that ESL/EFL student’s grammar can make it challenging for the tutor to work on the HOCs. The last approach, focus on the reader, is similar to the focus on form approach except that this approach uses the cultural difference between their own culture and ours to make them aware of how to address an audience. This approach seems like it would be effective with more advanced nonnative speakers. The less advanced ESL student should, in my opinion, learn how to structure and organize an essay first before worrying about how to address an audience. All three approaches can be very effective depending on the tutor, but I would use the form approach for less advanced students and the reader approach for more advanced students because this would be the most effective way of helping them.
The author, Sharon A.

Myers, discusses the purposes of this article by saying, "I want to show (…) that it is indeed the "linguistic" component (vocabulary and syntax) that ESL students as much or more than what is considered the "writing" (rhetorical0 component that ESL need most, and that their "errors" are persistent evidence of normal second-language learning and processing" (Myers 52). Myers believes that tutors should be cultural informants, similarly to "Guilt-Free Tutoring." She believes that being a cultural informant is more than just the structure of a society, but also the "way that a language determines, subordinates, complements, coordinates, pluralizes, counts, modalizes, interrogates, and lexicalizes"(Myers 55). She goes on to say that “writing tutors need to acknowledge and respond to the central role of lexis in language learning” (Myers 65). From reading the article, Myers opinion seems to be that tutors need to realize that ESL/EFL students are not on the same level of writing as native speakers especially when it comes to the lexical part of the English language so they need to be taught in a different way. Some tutors might think of her teaching method as unethical, but this only so with native speakers who knows the language better than ESL

students.
The method Myers presents is similar to the method in the article “Guilt-Free Tutoring,” but this method seems to be more about the process approach than the contrastive rhetoric approach. She makes a very valid point by saying that the ESL students do not have a lexical understanding of the English language. They do not know the phrases “in some ways” or “highly significant,” which makes it harder for them to produce a college level essay. The approaches in this article are very useful and would seem to be effective, expect that she seems to mostly focus on lexical phrases and how that affects a students’ essay.