The Rise of the Graduate-Focused Writing Center: Exigencies and Responses

Graduate peer writing consultants as a community of practice: A study of how genre-based tutoring in a writing center affects international dissertation writers and their writing

“…GWCs may be an optimal learning context to target enhanced support for dissertation writers, as these spaces center individuals in ways that may be valuable for the idiosyncratic confluence of concerns that dissertation writers struggle with. However, these instructional contexts have not been the focus of empirical research for very long, considering that the first GWCs were established in the early 2000s (Summers, 2019). Therefore, knowledge in both EAP and writing center scholarship about the impact of GBWI in a GWC context is scarce.…”

“…Universities are increasingly adapting the practice of offering supplemental writing support through writing centers to help graduate students who are writing theses and dissertations (Summers, 2019). Could a group of peer tutors at a GWC, trained in EAP-informed approaches to writing support, bridge the gap for non-native dissertation writers?…”

“…When it comes to tutoring in graduate writing centers (GWCs), the EAP concepts of genre and discourse community have begun to be taken up, possibly because the specific needs of graduate student writers, of whom many are NNSs, are often inextricable from their highly specialized content knowledge and language backgrounds (Simpson, 2012).It is not clear how closely GWC tutoring adheres to the definition Topping provides, as this tutoring context is emergent (Summers, 2019). Summers (2019) asserts that universities started establishing GWCs during a historical "crisis" (p. 51) period in which universities were actively combating high attrition rates for Ph.D. students at the same time as they were admitting increasing numbers of international students needing writing and language support. At this time, the effectiveness of GWCs at curbing the crisis in only speculative.…”