ABSTRACT
How we go about empowering English as a second language (ESL) students when they enter regular college composition classes in the United States is determined by our response to two questions: What do we wish them to be empowered to do, and for whom are they being empowered? Our first response to these questions (a traditional, nominal one) is that we wish ESL students to acquire enough facility with standard written English (SWE) to succeed in school and in the workplace for their own benefit and, second, especially in the case of the large numbers of ESL students who are immigrants to this country, for the benefit of our society. To achieve these goals, we need to emphasize grammatical and syntactic correctness and, certainly at the college level where students are called upon to use written communication in a variety of disciplines and for a variety of purposes, we need to emphasize the larger rhetorical conventions of academic writing. Although, as Raimes (1986) notes, we have problems of implementation even in separate ESL classes, we have at hand the means of establishing programs to meet these goals.
