ESL and LD students: Diverse Populations, Common Concerns
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Date
2007
Authors
Hirschhorn, Jane
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Description
The university writing center serves students with a diverse range of skill levels, learning styles, and linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The two most diverse groups of students who visit our offices regularly are students for whom English is a second language (ESL) and students with learning disabilities (LD). This diversity presents itself both in the scope of their needs at all stages of the writing process (brainstorming, fluency, sentence structure, organization, grammar, etc.) and the varying degree to which they need assistance in these and other areas. Although ESL and LD students’ writing concerns are often different from one another, these two groups nonetheless encounter common difficulties in language fluency, comprehension, organization, and familiarity with the rhetorical patterns of academic writing in English.