U.S. resident non-native speakers have typically had some schooling in the United States. Reid says that these students tend to be orally very fluent, but that they may have difficulty with accuracy in writing. She talks about native language transfer and ear-learning as two possible causes for the errors that these students tend to make.

International students also struggle with writing in English. Reid acknowledges that stduents from different countries have different experience in learning English, but points out that many of them have done years and years of sentence-level grammar exercises. They can often explain grammatical rules, but they have difficulty producing accurate sentences in their writing. Reid mentions first language transfer as one cause for their mistakes; she also notes that they are often unfamiliar with idioms.

Reid says that in dealing with NNS writing, instructors should focus on errors that impede meaning first. She says that familiarity with students' backgrounds is important because it can help instructors choose which errors to address and how to address them; knowing their backgrounds is also useful when it comes to advising students about the outside help they can access.

She reminds instfuctors that writing in a second language is extremely challenging and calls for patience and understanding when working with non-native speakers.

2. Normal discourse (ND): ND applies to conversation in a community of agreeing peers: “a group of people who accept, and whose work is guided by, the same paradigms and the same code of values and assumptions� (p.401). In Bruffee’s conception, when students work collaboratively, they actually “converse� and, as a result, are provided with the social context, common ground, and the kind of community in which ND can happen.

3. Authority of knowledge: Knowledge is the consequence of challenging beliefs and negotiating paradigms through conversation thus CL is a valuable opportunity that allows students to “negotiate their way into that conversation� (p.406).

4. New knowledge, abnormal discourse, and authority:
CL challenges the traditional structure of the classroom and thereby the authority of teachers: they are no longer defined as people in touch with privileged sources of knowledge, but “those members of a knowledge community who accept the responsibility for inducting members into the community� and, as a result, students have access to the “conversation of mankind� (p.410).
Additionally, abnormal discourse occurs when consensus no longer exists in the community of knowledge. If the disruption of normal discourse is successful, it is considered “revolutionary,� if not it is considered as “kooky� discourse. However, while teachers can only work with tools of ND, abnormal discourse is a device of creativity that could challenge “reliance on the canonical conventions and vocabulary of normal discourse� (p.408). The implication for writing instruction “involves demonstrating to students that they know something only when they can explain it in writing to the satisfaction of the community of their knowledgeable peers� (p.412).

Delpit agrees that it’s important to respect students’ home cultures and the styles of speech that are currently comfortable for students. Peer workshops, literacy autobiographies and other trappings of progressive classrooms are valuable, as they affirm students’ own expertise, but insufficient. Instructors must explicitly teach the codes of the culture of power, such as the conventions of standard English, so that students may ultimately gain some measure of power as participants in that culture. Standard English and other conventions should be presented in their political and historical contexts, not as superior but as the rules of the power players’ game. They should be taught through relevant communication situations rather than depersonalized memorization. But students must demonstrate their proficiency with the rules in the papers and other materials they produce: “Teachers do students no service to suggest, even implicitly, that ‘product’ is not important� (447).

Meanwhile, educators who see injustice in requiring people to conform to arbitrary codes should work toward institutional change—serving on curriculum and admissions committees, for instance.