Writing Across Cultures

As an international student who yearns to become a successful writer in the university, I have always been aware of the interplay among culture, linguistic and rhetoric. Sometimes, it is difficult to negotiate among those three elements by myself because immersing in a different set of language rule systems requires more than mere personal effort. I begin to realize that without the guidance from an experienced writing tutor, most ESL students will encounter the recurring struggle of trying to express their ideas in a context and language distinct from their origin.

The current paradigm of writing center pedagogy advocates collaboration and nondirective tutoring. Both approaches seek to diminish the traditional power imbalance between tutors and students by making the students instead of the tutors the primary agents of the writing process. Lunsford maintains that if “the tutor is still the seat of all authority, … , it can lead to the kind of homogeneity that squelches diversity…that erases rather than value differences” (3). Scholars like Brooks, who advocate nondirective tutoring, hold the view that “the student, not the tutor, should ‘own’ the paper and take full responsibility for it” (2). Brooks, together with North, agrees that tutors should not act as editors who correct mechanical errors in students’ writing. As North states, “the primary goal in teaching writing should be: the development of general patterns of thinking and writing” (434). Unwilling to promote a hierarchical power relation in the writing center, and under the influence of the minimalist approach which endorses a “no-editing” policy, tutors are advised to remain detached from the student’s writing during a tutoring session to imply that they do not want to be a part in the student’s work. According to the current practice, “tutors [are] trained to work from the top down, from higher-order concerns such as clarity, focus, and organization to lower-order concerns of sentence-level correctness.”

This current pedagogy seems to work efficiently for traditional American college students, who are native English speakers. However, as the number of international students increases, writing centers may have to reevaluate the current tutoring approach, which may not be applicable to non-natives. ESL students have a limited command of the English language which hinders their ability to put their thoughts into words. In this case, a minimalist tutoring which refrains from instructing the students how to correct sentence-level errors may not be beneficial to ESL students. Sharon Myers points out that “it is indeed the ‘linguistic’ component (vocabulary and syntax) as much or more than what is considered the ‘writing’ (rhetorical) component that ESL students need most” (52). Myers argues that since the verbal codes of English are the fundaments of any piece of writing, ESL students simply lack the means to express themselves in written English because they do not understand the rule systems of English. She states that it would be more helpful to ESL students if tutors adopted a directive approach towards their sentence-level errors. As Myers points out, “meaning does not flow from such knowledge and experience [of writing in English according to the rule systems of the language], but the ability to express meaning does” (55). Thus, tutors, who are more familiar with the rule systems of English, cannot simply ignore sentence-level issues in ESL students’ writing. Rather, tutors have a responsibility to teach students the phonology (by reading out loud), morphology, semantics and syntactics of English, which are the basic components of any language. Otherwise, no matter how well constructed the ESL students’ ideas are, they still cannot effectively convey their messages through written English.

In one of the tutorial sessions I observed, the tutor insisted that she would not review any grammatical issues with the ESL student before the student could clearly articulate what she was trying to convey. This put the student in a position she could not really move beyond: the student already had the concept in her mind but she lacked the proper language to express that idea in English. Unfortunately, the tutor did not seem to be aware that the student was asking for help with the most fundamental linguistic component when she said, “Could you make my paper sound English?” The tutor took that as the student’s reluctance to further develop her arguments in the writing. As a result, the tutor refused to tackle sentence-level issues, which she deemed as less important than the global review of the paper. The tutor was clearly not aware of the significance of English grammar that Myers mentions.

Contrary to Myers, Jane Cogie maintains that tutors should not assume the role of grammar instructor. She and her colleagues suggest that tutors, instead of taking a directive role in correcting grammatical issues, should develop strategies which will enable the ESL students to self-edit. Although this measure can help ESL students become more independent, it is only applicable to those who have advanced proficiency in English. For those who do not understand the basic components of English language, self-editing is simply unfeasible because as Myers points out, “[ESL] students are very often painfully aware of their errors, but are not sure or simply do not know how to fix them” (58). According to Myers, then, at their early phase of learning how to write in English, ESL students will be more benefitted if tutors adopt a directive approach to their sentence-level issues. From my own experience and my conversations with other international students, I do think that Myers has a better grasp of what writing problems ESL students are trying to tackle. It is worth pointing out that ESL students are not unwilling to take an active role in editing their own writing; on the contrary, most of them desperately hope that they do have to ability to identify and correct the errors themselves. Cogie may have over-simplified the problem, and therefore failed to handle the real language issue ESL students are facing with their writing. It will be more effective for the tutors to first equip ESL students with more knowledge about the usage of English by directively instructing on sentence-level issues.

This, however, does not suggest that tutors should become editors of the writing of ESL students’ writing, helping them fix every grammatical mistake before they understand what they have done wrong. Kate Gadbow provides a useful tutoring principle in this case: “if there’s a rule to cover the error, we discuss it, even if it means we don’t ‘fix up’ as much of the paper as the student would like” (3). The point here is that tutors should not refrain from directively dealing with any syntactical or lexical errors in the writing of ESL students. They should be aware that ESL students are not merely learning how to improve their writing—they are learning a new language with a verbal code and rule system distinct from their own. Even though the tutors should instruct the students with grammatical problems, they should always attempt to explain them in terms of the basic linguistic components and general stylistic rules of English, so that the ESL students will not always be dependent on the tutors.

As the secretary of the Asian Students Alliance on campus, I interact with other international students on a regular basis. One of the students I talked to, who used to take ESL classes in high school, told me that when she first arrived at the States, she had almost no command of written English. “There was no way I could learn without having a teacher directing me where to go. I could not even properly express myself in verbal English, not to mention writing with it,” she said in retrospect. While directive instruction with grammatical rules was helpful, she said she benefitted the most from examples that the teacher used to elaborate and explain the norms in English. That gave her a better idea of how the language functioned fundamentally, which enabled to finally move beyond the dependence she had on the teacher.

In addition to directively imparting knowledge on textual issues, Judith Power suggests that tutors should also take an active role as a “cultural informant.” as it is worth noticing that “language is taught to individuals by others and this is transmitted from generation to generation in much the same way as culture” (171). In one of the sections of Intercultural Competence: Interpersonal Communication Across Cultures, Lustig and Koester emphasize the significance of culture in understanding the semantics and pragmatics of a certain language. They illustrate that connotative meanings of the semantics are embedded within cultures, so the differences of intercultural connotations can lead to severe misunderstanding. In the example they provide, an African American is offended because his Nigerian friend calls him a “boy.” Neither is aware that their connotation of the term “boy” differs from the other’s: “to the Nigerian student, the term boy connotes a friendly and familiar relationship. To the African American student, however, the term boy evokes images of racism, oppression, and an attempt to place him in an inferior social status” (176). In the light of this example, tutors should be aware that problems in ESL students’ writing which appear to be local and word-level errors have their roots in a more serious problem—cultural barriers. Such barriers are even more obstructive when it comes to learning pragmatics because “it considers how users of a particular language are able to understand the meanings of specific utterances in particular contexts” (177). Lustig and Jolene point out that “the rules governing the pragmatics of a language are firmly embedded in the larger rules of the culture and are intimately associated with cultural patterns” (178). This observation reveals that language learning and cultural immersion are inseparable. Therefore, if tutors do not actively take on the role as “cultural informants,” they will not be able to assist ESL students who are proficient in English, but are unable to convey their ideas effectively in written forms. Tutors have to understand that there are very limited ways non-natives can learn the pragmatics of English by themselves, making it important for tutors to actively engage in the tutoring session with ESL students instead of adopting a hands-off approach.

Rhetorical issues, however, cannot be handled as directively as sentence-level errors. Tutors must be aware that the rhetoric of ESL students’ writing is cultural-relative. As a result, tutors have to negotiate between directive and minimal tutoring when they handle different issues in the student’s writing: while it is appropriate and efficient to for tutors to take a directive role to impart grammatical knowledge, tutors should not obliviously adopt the same technique when they work on the student’s rhetorical pattern. Tutors have to be sensitive to different rhetorical values ESL students hold because those values are deeply embedded in their original culture. For example, Kaplan mentions that Arabic students tend to write in parallelism because it is similar to the rhetoric in Koran. To show respect to the students’ culture, tutors should avoid imposing the rhetoric of American academic discourse to the writing of ESL students. Otherwise, if they maintain that the rhetoric of the academic discourse is superior and the only proper way to construct a piece of writing, tutors will be alleged of promoting another form of ethnocentrism and assuming too much authority.

Lustig and Koester define values as “what a culture regards as good or bad, right or wrong, valuable or worthless, appropriate or inappropriate. Values are often offered as the explanation for the way in which people communicate” (81). ESL students’ perception of rhetoric is, therefore, deeply affected by their original culture. Their standard of good rhetoric affects the way they construct their writing. Usually, their writing style differs from the recognized rhetorical pattern in the American academic discourse because of the cultural difference in rhetorical value. Quoting the findings of various researchers, Harris states that
“we have learned about the Asian preference for indirection, which contrasts with the American preference for clear, overt announcement of a topic in an introductory paragraph, about the difference between languages in which the reader is responsible for making meaning from the text and languages, such as English, in which the writer is responsible for making the meaning obvious to the readers, and about some languages’ higher tolerance for digression.”

Among the students I talked to, one of them was a competent writer in both Korean and English. However, he found it difficult when he was asked to translate one of his Korean papers into English. “Korean allows writers to omit certain expressions. But if I did that in my English writing, the paper would not even make sense.” At the end, he reconstructed the organization of the whole paper because it was impossible for him to directly translate the same idea from Korean to English. This illustrates that each culture has its unique discourse that may not be applicable to another language. Tutors thus have to bear in mind that not all languages share the same set of values on expressions as the American academic discourse. Tutors should not judge the structure of ESL student’s writing with the rhetoric which they have taken for granted—the rhetorical pattern adopted in the American academic discourse.

Rhetoric deserves special attention because it is related to one’s thought process and her perception of the world. Lustig, Jolene, and Kaplan, all at certain point, mention the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This theory of linguistic relativity argues that “language shapes how people think and experience their world” (185). As mentioned earlier, the use of language is influenced by one’s cultural background. Therefore, this theory reveals that one’s thought, culture, and language are all interwoven. With this discovered, tutors will be unethically attempting to change the cultural thought patterns of ESL students if they insist that students should construct their rhetoric according to the American academic discourse. Barwarshi and Pelkowski argue that by “transform[ing] the student and his or texts into the acceptable standard of the university, […], his home discourse has been silenced.” They also state that “the rhetorical context of the university, its academic discourses, is constituted by and in turn constitutes the social and political agenda of the dominant culture.” Therefore, if tutors become the proxy of the authority of the university and impose the rhetorical values of the academic discourse to ESL students, they may be unethically forcing the students to surrender their own cultural thought pattern to the dominant one—the American one.

During my first semester in college, various faculty members had commented on my diction and expression as they did not quite fit into the American discourse. The instructor of my Seminar in Composition once urged me to revise several sentences and word choices because they were “too British and stood out to [her].” She then offered me a list of synonyms which were “more American.” I unwillingly changed my word choice because as an ESL freshman, I did not think I was at the position to challenge the authority of my writing instructor. At the same time, I felt that I had lost part of my cultural identity because I was aware that my original diction reflected the historic background of my home city as a former British colony. I do think that it is important for tutors to be sensitive to the cultural ties ESL students have to their home countries. Tutors should refrain from taking a dominant role when addressing the students’ rhetorical values because the usage of language plays a central role in the students’ cultural identity and thought process. As long as the students can convey their messages effectively with their original rhetoric, tutors should not insist that they change their discourse.

This practice, however, seems contrary to what tutors are supposed to do: help ESL students become better writers within the realm of the university. It is inevitable that ESL students will have to conform to the American academic discourse in order to be recognized as successful writers. Jacoby, in light of the medical ethics, suggests that tutors can adopt the concept of informed consent: explain the consequences of using different discourses. For example, if a Chinese student comes in with a paper full of memorized quotes and indirect sentences, a cultural sensitive tutor will inform her of the consequence of her rhetorical choice, by saying that “I understand that you are writing according to the standard of Chinese language, which is central to your cultural identity. However, this standard is different from the academic discourse we use in the university. If you insist on writing in the Chinese rhetorical pattern, I am afraid that your professor will not recognize you as a competent writer.” Although this model seems to present the ESL student with more options, it actually is only a Hobson’s choice: due to the inherent power imbalance—imbalance between the tutor and the student because the student depends solely on the tutor to instruct her the rule systems of English, and imbalance between the student and the institution—the ESL student will have to succumb to the code of the authority, which in this case, is the academic discourse.

There may not be a true resolution between the conflicting discourses due to the political hierarchy between the students’ home discourse and the dominant American academic rhetoric. Therefore, instead of presenting this so-called “freedom of choice”, it may be better to call the ESL students’ attention to this stark reality that they will have to conform to the code of the authority if they want to succeed, while at the same time explain to them how and why such academic discourse is formed. It is not ethical to delude the students that they can maintain the rhetorical pattern of their native language but still be able to enter the realm of the dominant discourse without being discriminated. Referring to the previous example, the tutor can add that, “overusing clichés and indirect sentences will hinder the reader from understanding your argument. That is why the rhetorical pattern of academic discourse here encourages you to write in a concise manner.”

Tutoring ESL students brings about a wide range of dilemmas: directive versus non-directive approach, sentence-level issues versus global review, and linguistic versus rhetoric. More importantly, the various cultural backgrounds of ESL students provoke the struggle between different styles of discourse. As a result, not only do tutors have to adopt different techniques when tackling different levels of writing issues, they also need to carefully handle any cultural or political rhetoric that may be present in the writing of ESL students.

This certainly is not an easy problem to tackle. Although currently I do not have any firsthand experience tutoring ESL students, I would like to speculate on certain practices that tutors can adopt. First, it will be more efficient for the tutor to first assess the English proficiency of the ESL student by engaging in casual conversations before she begins working with the student. If the student shows difficulty maintaining the conversation, the tutor will have to discern whether he is reluctant or unable to communicate in English. Depending on the tutor’s observation of the student, she can either adopt a more inviting tone or articulate herself slowly and clearly. Sometimes, paper and pen will come into handy—tutors can jot down the main points throughout the session because most ESL students are more receptive to written English. Before diving into the student’s writing, the tutor should make sure that both of them share mutual understanding and expectation of the session. Although I mentioned above that a lot of ESL students will prefer receiving directive instruction on sentence-level issues, it may not always be the case. Understanding is always essential to an effective tutoring session. Problems arise, however, when the tutor and the ESL student fail to compromise with each other. Given the time limit of each session, it will be futile if the tutor insists on her own approach without taking into account the student’s concern. Based on my observation and personal experience, I do think that it is the tutor’s responsibility to try understanding the rationale behind the ESL student’s concerns and expectations. Tutors should also take into account the emotional pressure the student is facing when he is forced to express his opinions or personal thoughts in a foreign language. However, over-empathizing with the ESL student may give the tutor an urge to refine the whole piece of writing for him, so that the student’s paper will be well received by the university. To avoid doing so, the tutor must maintain constant interaction with the student throughout the session to ensure that she is not taking complete control of the student’s work. When the tutor notices repeated use of certain rhetorical patterns that are not usually recognized by the code of the university, she should discuss this openly with the student because as mentioned earlier in the paper, this may be a cultural sensitive issue that cannot be dismissed as a simple “mistake.”

It is impossible to deduce one uniform set of strategies that can be applicable and efficient to all ESL students. At the beginning, tutors may experience several unfruitful sessions. However, trial-and-error is one of the learning processes tutors inevitably must go through. Over time, experienced tutors may be able to swiftly shift gears to accommodate different ESL students. But before having a firm grasp on conducting tutorial across cultures, tutors may first have to develop keen observation, cultural sensitivity and the willingness to embrace different values.

Works Cited
Bawarshi, Anis and Stephanie Pelkowski. “Postcolonialism and the Idea of a Writing Center.” Writing Center Journal 19.2 (1999): 41-58.
Brooks, Jeff. “Minimalist Tutoring: Making Student Do All the Work.” Writing Lab Newsletter 19.2 (1992):1-4.
Cogie, Jane. Kim Strain, and Sharon Lorinskas. “Avoiding the Proofreading Trap: The Value of the Error Correction Process.” The Writing Center Journal 19.2 (1999): 7-31
Gadbow, Kate. “Foreign Students in the Writing Lab: Some Ethical and Practical Considerations.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 17.3 (1992): 1-5.
Harris, Mauriel (1997). “Cultural Conflcits in the Writing Center: Expectations and Assumptions of ESL Students.” Writing in Multicultural Settings. (Carol Severino, Juan C. Guerra, and Johnnella E. Butler Ed.). New York : Modern Language Association of America
Jacoby, Jay (1994). “ “The Use of Force”: Medical Ethics and Center Practice.” Intersections-Theory-Practice in the Writing Center (Joan A. Mullin & Ray Wallace, Ed.). National Council of Teachers of English.
Kaplan, Robert B. “Contrastive Rhetoric and the Teaching of Composition.” TESOL Quarterly 1.4 (1967): 10-16.
Kilborn, Judith. “Cultural Diversity in the Writing Center: Defining Ourselves and Our Challenge.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 19.1(1994): 7-10.
Lunsford, Andrea. “Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center.” Writing Center Journal 12.1 (1991): 3-10.