Although I've been fortunate enough not to have to tutor an ESL student yet, I find it interesting that of the three terms for trying to tutor an ESL student: Assimilation, Accomodation, and Seperatism, assimilation is the only one I have a hard time trying to justify.
Accomodation is the happy medium of the two, and probably the example we want to follow the closest by working with their preconceived notions about writing, and seperatism is a hands-off approach to try and maintain the cultural identity of the ESL student. But assimilation seems to be a leading cause of concern for tutoring any student, not just ESL. Assimilation can be seen in many other ways than just in the writing center, but essentially it forces traditions and linguistic norms on to a person without accomodating their own personal knowledge and style of writing.
I've had to deal with assimilation myself and drawing from personal experience, I didn't learn anything from it. If anything I just shot for average to complete the assignment. I wasn't invested and I was only concerned with my grade. If I thought that as an NES student, I can only imagine an ESL student will feel the same way, if not more, causing a rift in the goals and actual accomplishments of the tutoring sessions.
Assimilation to me is plan C. If nothing else is working and you have to do something, than settle for forcing some standard on the ESL student to help them see another example of a way to write.
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This is a very good point, Roger. Too often the academy itself assumes an assimilationist stance: You will learn to write/think/speak like an academic, or else you have no place here (and by the way, "like an academic" often means "like an old dead white guy"). We always have to be aware of the culturally-constructed nature of language. No word is innocent; no assumption is without bias. When we read a basic writers' text and are horrified by the lack of intelligence we perceive in the run-on sentences and missing thesis, we're still being ethnocentric - the culture we're upholding is the culture of hegemonic power, which tells us that Standard Edited American English and linear presentation of thought are the defining characteristics of intelligence. Excellent post!
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