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

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

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