Speaking Students," an article appearing nine years after Power's endorsement of a "more direct, more didactic" approach (41), Blau and Hall offer guidelines that affirm flexible priorities and the role of direct tutoring strategies. In the sessions analyzed in their study, directness proved helpful to meeting the ESL students' need for cultural information and for avoiding the related tendency for Socratic questioning to deteriorate into "trolling for the right answer" (33). Another notable finding was that line-by-line sentence-level tutoring tended to lead beyond surfacelevel errors to discussions of meaning and thus to the resolution of the frequently noted conflict between the agendas of ESL learners, eager for error correction (35; see also Harris and Silva 530-531) and the agendas of tutors, who are typically trained to focus first on whole-essay concerns. From these findings, Blau and Hall conclude that tutors should "be comfortable with the directive approach, especially with local concerns such as grammar, punctuation, idioms, and word usage," and with "working line-by-line" (42). They emphasize that their guidelines are not rules (43) and that tutors who find themselves "editing" have gone too far with the directive approach (41). However, they also suggest the unlikelihood that teachers and tutors would fall into the role of editor: "No good writing teacher would correct students' errors for them or appropriate their texts. Perhaps the true distinction here is between editing and teaching, rather than between directive and non-directive" (24-25).

The cultural informant role as sketched by Judith Powers, in her article “Rethinking Writing Center Conferencing Strategies for the ESL Writer,” was warmly received in our writing center when I introduced it shortly after her article appeared in 1993. With ESL students comprising a steady 30% to 40% of our clients, we had had plenty of experience with feeling not only the inadequacy of nondirective tutoring for meeting the needs of non-native writers but also the uneasiness of sessions that strayed from that approach, by then synonymous with effective one-toone work (Brooks 1; Ashton-Jones 31-33; Shamoon and Burns 135-36). The cultural informant role endorsed by Powers gives writing center tutors flexibility for meeting specific needs of ESL students not met by the nondirective writing center ideal. With their many cultural, rhetorical, and linguistic differences, ESL students often lack the knowledge to engage in the question-and-answer approach to problem-solving used in most writing centers (Powers 40-41). And the read-aloud method for discovering sentence-level errors, frequently productive for native speakers, provides little help to ESL students who lack the ear to hear their own errors (Powers 41-42). The value of the cultural informant role, then, is that it validates sharing information about English that these students have no way of knowing on their own. Yet after several semesters of basking in this more flexible approach, many of us on the staff, including graduate assistants in both English and Linguistics as well as practicum students, began to feel that too often this role, at least when sentence-level errors were concerned, tended to translate into the tutor editing and the student observing. Katherine Purcell, in her recent article “Making Sense of Meaning: ESL 6 The Writing Center Journal

The range of outreach projects recounted in recent journal articles, discussions on WCENTER’s electronic forum, and conference presentations indicate that collectively we as writing center professionals have indeed been working to extend the conversation about one-to-one work across our campuses. Writing across the curriculum partnerships with classroom teachers (Gill; Mullin, “Tutoring for Law Students”; Soliday), satellite writing centers in dorms or specific academic departments (“Advice on Satellite Centers”), on-line writing centers (Denny and Livesey), and administrative portfolios reflecting the complex combination of teaching, research, and administration entailed in the work of writing center directors (Olson; Perdue) are all examples of the expanding presence of writing centers at our institutions. Yet if we are to extend the benefits of one-to-one work to teachers, the individuals who most influence the type of writing our students do, we need to find ways of communicating with them directly and regularly. The conference summary—the record of a tutor’s interaction with a student, written up and sent to the instructor upon the student’s written request—offers one of the few ways we have to extend the discussion of one-to-one work beyond the center on a weekly basis. However, this form is not universally endorsed. Some writing center professionals—including those described as “sharers” by Michael Pemberton in a 1995 Writing Lab Newsletter “Ethics” column—perceive these reports as promoting “a unified educational experience for students” and “productive relationships with faculty” (13). Others—including those described by Pemberton as “seclusionists”—see summaries as just another instance of limiting tutors to the role of “service workers” for instructors (Pemberton 13).