Writing Center as a Contact Zone: Meeting ESL Writers Halfway

Paired with Jessica Murray's article (see below), Jared Bezet's piece theorizes the challenges of introducing ESL writers to standard academic English. One role of the writing center in the American academy is to include the segment of the student population unfamiliar not only with American academic discourse, but also standard American English. Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone” and Muriel Harris’s “Individualized Instruction in Writing Centers: Attending to Cross-Cultural Differences” offer terms useful in this consideration. These terms allow us to distinguish the writing center’s role from that of the composition classroom in student writers’ development.University Writing Cente