Teacher-student writing conferences are considered a valuable teaching method in composition courses, used mostly with the purpose of discussing students' progress in their writing. This article presents an exploratory study on student and instructor expectations and perceptions of writing conferences in a semester-long writing course for multilingual students. The sample consists of 100 students who were enrolled in this course and eight instructors who were teaching it. The course examined here was designed to offer one lecture and one writing conference per week to each student, resulting in two writing conferences for each of the five writing tasks. The factors examined are teacher preparation time and strategy, format (individual and group writing conferences), length, frequency, topics discussed, and overall satisfaction. The authors collected data through extensive surveys that included Likert-type scales, item ranking, and open-ended questions. The results show that the students and their instructors regarded individual conferences of 10 minutes to be more effective than longer group conferences; however, participants voiced weaknesses of both types of conferences. The results and implications inform writing instructors and administrators about possible uses of such a course design and potential improvements for the use of writing conferences in second language writing courses. Research on writing conferences has mostly focused on their use in first language (L1) composition courses or writing centers. Teacher-student conferences, a well-established pedagogical practice in composition, made their way into second language (L2) writing courses following the paradigm shift from a productcentered teaching approach to a process approach, which introduced the multiple-draft approach to writing (for a historical overview of conferences in English composition, see Lerner, 2005). Some of the early publications on writing conferences consisted of writing teachers' reflections on teacher-student interactions, dialogic interactions in writing conferences, and suggestions for conference activities (Duke, 1975;Murray, 1968;Schiff, 1978). Writing conferences could take the form of group, pair, or individual discussions and activities (Schiff, 1978) and could be used either as the only form of instruction or in combination with regular classroom hours. However, most empirical research on writing conferences has restricted their use to "only two parties, a teacher and a student" (Carnicelli, 1980, p. 101). However, in existing research, conferences were seldom used as the dominant instructional method in writing classes. The study presented here extends this research area by investigating the perception and attitudes of instructors and multilingual students toward the use of writing conferences in an English as a second language (ESL) writing course that is designed to incorporate mandatory weekly conferences.
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