The university writing center provides a key support service within the institution, and as such must find ways to evaluate the impact of the instruction they provide. However, many studies of tutorial effectiveness lack adequate analyses of tutorial talk and of both student and tutor interpretations of behavior and outcomes. This study characterizes successful writing tutorials by employing a hybrid methodology, interactional sociolinguistics, combining conversation-analytic and ethnographic techniques. Twelve tutorials, six with native speakers of English (NSs) and six with nonnative speakers (NNSs), were analyzed for features such as topic introduction, type and frequency of directives and their mitigation, volubility, overlaps, backchannels, and laughter. By triangulating this analysis with participant interpretations compiled from interview data, a profile of a "successful" tutorial emerged. Associated with perceived success were conversational turn structure, tutor mitigation of directives, simultaneous laughter, affiliative overlaps, and small talk. In addition, symmetrical interpretations of directive forcefulness and tutor "helpfulness" characterized successful tutorials. Implications of the study are both theoretical and practical. Recommendations are made that tutor preparation and in-service training emphasize less idealized, more pragmatic conceptualizations of tutor roles and actions and focus on behaviors demonstrated as constitutive of success.
Conflicts between comprehensibility, politeness, and effective tutorial practice frequently create communicative impasses in interaction between university writing center tutors and their tutees, who are both native (NS) and non-native Speakers (NNSs) ofEnglish. Conversational excerpts drawn from a study of 34 tutorials demonstrate that such impasses are more frequent in tutorials with NNS tutees. The primäry context for these impasses is the offering of tutor evaluations and suggestions, although the interactional features of volubility and interruptions are also implicated in the analysis. I argue that the trade-offs tutors make between comprehensibility, politeness, and ejfectiveness are essential characteristics of NS-NNS tutorial interaction and that open acknowledgment of the conflicts between communicative aims is essential toprincipled tutorial practice in this institutional discourse context.
This article investigates tutor dominance in academic writing tutorials within the framework of institutional discourse. Tutor gender and tutee gender and language proficiency, as well as the interaction of the three, are considered as exponents of interactant dominance. Pragmatic measures of tutor dominance selected are frequency of directives, directive type, and mitigation strategies. Analysis indicates that these features of tutors' speech remain relatively constant in interactions with male and female tutees or with native and nonnative speakers of English. These results suggest that institutional context outweighs gender and language proficiency in the definition of participant roles and the sanctioning of tutor dominance behaviors.
S econd-language writers attending U.S. colleges and universities generally fall into one of three groups: 1. EFL writers who were educated in their mother tongue (L1) and are learning English as their L2 (often referred to as foreign or international students) 2. ESL writers who are recent immigrants to the United States, often with educational backgrounds in their L1 3. Generation 1.5 writers who are long-term U.S.residents and English learners fluent in spoken English. Harklau, Losey, and Siegal (1999) With backgrounds in U.S. culture and schooling, they [Generation 1.5 writers] are distinct from international students or other newcomers who have been the subject of most ESL writing literature, while at the same time these students' status as English language learners is often treated as incidental or even misconstrued as underpreparation in writings on mainstream college composition and basic writing. (p. vii) In fact, because they have come up through the public school system, where mainstreaming (actually submersion) and age-related promotion have obscured their status as English language learners, Generation 1.5 writers themselves eschew the label ESL. As a result, they have largely been ignored by writing specialists who study native speakers of English because their writing contains nonnative, ESL features. Likewise, they also have been ignored by writing specialists who study nonnative speakers of English because they rarely enroll in ESL writing classes.In this article, 1 I explain how a key academic support service, the university writing center, can assist Generation 1.5 students as they develop their writing skills. Because of its autonomous status within the university, the writing center offers an opportunity for Generation 1.5 students (who may not want to refer to themselves as ESL students) to receive L2 writing instruction in an anonymous and unstigmatized atmosphere. By recognizing the learning abilities and limitations that distinguish Generation 1.5 students from other ESL learners, writing tutors and, by extension, writing instructors can develop appropriate intervention strategies for this growing segment of the U.S. postsecondary population. Furthermore, the principles and practices highlighted in this article may be applied during writing conferences and other teacher-student exchanges intended to improve students' L2 writing ability.Writing centers in U.S. colleges and universities began as writing labs in the 1930s. Lab clients were racial, ethnic, or gender minorities judged by their teachers to need remediation. This characterization of writing centers as places where these students' special needs are met by the university has changed as the centers have become mechanisms for increasing access to and retaining students. Today, they play a vital role in freshman writing programs A proposal for serving Generation 1.5 students in the writing center must begin with an awareness of the similarities and differences in the backgrounds and needs of Generation 1.5 and ESL/EFL writers.as ...
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