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This collection will fill a huge gap in teacher preparation materials for writing center tutors. The papers in this highly practical and well balanced collection will help tutors who work with ESL writers and those who train and supervise them not only with their one-to-one conferencing techniques but also with the development of tutoring materials appropriate for L2 writers. I commend the editors and authors for their valuable contribution to the L2 writing field.
- Dana Ferris, ESL Coordinator, California State University, Sacramento

This book offers extremely valuable insights from a variety of different voices on how tutoring ESL students can differ dramatically from working with native speakers. Of particular interest, though, is also the similarity of our tutoring practices with these two distinct populations.
- Vicki Russell, Director of the Writing Studio, Duke University

Finally, a book written for writing center tutors who assist ESL students. Combining practical tutoring advice with insights that build cultural bridges, ESL Writers helps tutors create a more meaningful and effective exchange between themselves and nonnative English speakers.

• Cultural Contexts examines many of the challenges students face as they become proficient speakers and writers of English.
• The ESL Tutoring Session focuses on individual meetings with students whose primary language is not English. Packed with helpful tips and new perspectives on familiar routines, this section demonstrates strategies likely to be effective with nonnative speakers.
• A Broader View adds depth and breadth to the discussion by demonstrating how writing centers abroad operate, offering insights into the rules and conventions of English, and sharing the stories of ESL students who visit the writing center.

For tutors, this indispensable guide gives them the know-how to make better informed choices as they conduct sessions with ESL students. For writing center directors, ESL Writers is the perfect training text, and its examples and scenarios are the ideal jumping-off point for staff meetings and group problem-solving sessions.

Average Customer Rating:

Excellent	Customer Rating:
This text is well researched and thoughtfully presented with regard to content and theoretical application. It is also very well written and interesting reading, even for someone who is not an ESL tutor; for anyone who might also like to learn more about teaching or communication. The best of its kind that I've read. Really excellent.

Excellent, practical book for ESL writing tutors . . .

Customer Rating:

This collection of short essays by various writers is an excellent survey of the everyday practical issues facing college writing center directors and tutors who work with ESL writers. The editors, Bruce and Raforth, are at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where Raforth is the writing center director. The opening chapters on culture and language acquisition open wide the subject of culture shock faced by international students from countries where assumptions about writing, learning, research, and self-expression can be vastly different from American ones. The heart of the book focuses on a variety of aspects dealing directly with tutoring itself - getting started, reading an ESL writer's text, avoiding appropriation, helping ESL writers clarify their intended meaning, looking at the whole text, editing line by line, tutoring ESL writers online, raising questions about plagiarism, and so on. The closing chapters deal with broader issues: the role of writing in higher education abroad, the difficulty of explaining English, and a look at writing centers from the point of view of ESL students. I found this book full of thoughtful and practical reflections on the challenges of helping ESL students master academic writing in American universities. Analysis and opinions are based on research and extend a professional discourse dating back twenty years. Altogether the book is informative and highly accessible, written in plain English, unlike much theory-driven (and often politicized) scholarship on composition and rhetoric today. I recommend it to anyone affiliated with a writing center and especially to tutors who work with ESL students. It would make a fine textbook.