The Northeast Ohio Medical (NEOMED) University Writing Center was founded in the winter of 2022 to support its medical, pharmacy, and graduate students. Through trial, error, and creativity, the Writing Center Specialists developed a successful writing center offering collaborative synchronous and asynchronous sessions. Often, graduate education needs a different type of support than undergraduate students do: in-house editing combined with traditional theory. This initiative highlights the importance of writing and editing support in medical education, addressing diverse needs across NEOMED’s colleges and promoting effective writing practices. On February 21, 2022, in a small meeting space between two offices, Brian sat at a large, wooden, boardroom table staring out the large window into the Aneal Mohan Kohli Academic & Information Technology Center, the official name of the Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED) Library, waiting for the first students to appear for in-person writing tutoring. One week prior, Brian had signed a part-time (20 hours a week) contract to lead a writing center pilot project that ended on June 30, 2024. Brian was the Writing Center Specialist and was tasked with creating a writing center to support the more than 1,000 medical, pharmacy, and graduate students at NEOMED and had less than 30-months to do it. NEOMED is a stand-alone medical university in the rural community of Rootstown in Northeast, Ohio. It is not connected via physical space to any hospital system. NEOMED does not confer any undergraduate degrees but does offer several master’s and PhD programs for its students within its College of Graduate Studies. There are over 600 medical students, 300 pharmacy students, and more than 100 graduate students attending NEOMED. The school is within 50 miles of several teaching hospitals that partner with the NEOMED students in Cleveland, Akron, Canton, and Youngstown areas. The closest clinical location is a 20-mile drive from NEOMED’s campus. Brian’s background was in English Composition and Rhetoric, having taught at several universities since 2010. He worked in a Writing Center as a graduate student and followed writing center theory closely. Now, he was creating a writing center, carte blanche. He was given a common room and two offices. He had a small budget for paper products, a laptop, a bulletin board, and access to various means of communication. He met with the leaders of the three different colleges and asked the same questions: how can a writing center help your students? The answers were all different and began to mold the theoretical approach. NEOMED was founded in 1973 to meet Northeast Ohio’s critical need for primary care physicians. Much of the writing support for the College of Medicine (COM) was provided by the Assistant Director of Student Affairs and the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs. In the College of Pharmacy (COP), the Assistant Dean of Student Success worked with students as they navigated writing assignments. In the College of Graduate Studies (COGS), individual professors were tasked with this writing support. While the individual colleges attempted to support their students in their writing, typically, only the high-stakes professional writing—resumes, curriculum vitae (CVs), personal statements, and letters of intent—were given priority. As an example, the Assistant Director of Student Affairs for the COM reviewed 150-160 CVs and personal statements between May and July each year. The group of third-year medical students submitted their applications for residency programs through the Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS), the system used by medical graduates to apply for specialized training positions in hospitals. COGS, in which Brian had been an adjunct professor since 2018, needed academic writing support for its students. Many of the nine graduate programs had writing assignments throughout the semester. Some of the program’s students wrote master’s theses and others wrote doctoral dissertations. Many of these students utilized the Writing Center for support. Professors in COGS also asked Brian to create several writing specific videos which covered topics on grammar, punctuation, research writing, and formatting. COP had one goal in mind for the Writing Center, and that was supporting their second language learning (SLL) students. The SLL students struggled with plagiarism, understanding prompts, taking notes, research writing, and reaching out for help. In August 2023, 18 months after Brian was hired, funding was allocated to hire an SLL specialist, and Brook was hired to support the SLL students, specifically those in pharmacy. COM had a detailed list of needs for the Writing Center, much of which was high stakes writing. The number one need of the COM was to support the 600+ medical students as they create their professional CVs. Then, the Writing Center was asked to collaborate with the students as they create personal statements for residency applications and research opportunities. Medical students also created oral and poster presentations, journal articles, and many other writing projects. The University provided its students with 20 hours of writing support. Yet, after a week of being open, students did not come for the support they needed. Brian sent emails to cohorts. Announcements were made. It was clear that sitting at a table facing the window to the library and waiting for students to start coming in for in-person tutoring sessions was not happening. The typical, in-person consultation consisted of reading the paper out loud in the undergraduate writing center world that Brian was accustomed to. Undergraduate writing theory was not what the NEOMED students needed. Instead, it took trial and error, a lot of support, a little bit of money, and some creativity to establish the NEOMED Writing Center as a fully funded center of the University. Ultimately, the NEOMED Writing Center pilot program is a story that all graduate schools can use to create their own writing center. By promoting asynchronous sessions, screenshares, and collaboration, a graduate school writing center became successful.

Writing centers in Brazil emerge from an internationalization initiative that combines tutoring students on academic assignments and translating Portuguese articles written by faculty and graduate students into English. Thus, they arise from local needs and contexts. Three articles about writing centers in Brazil have been published, and only one mentioned student tutors’ views. This research aims to understand their views on being part of a Brazilian writing center while pursuing their majors and graduate courses. Through narratives, four participants have voiced challenges regarding dealing with texts from a diversity of fields, handling technical terms, and expressed varying degrees of self-confidence when working with a text written by an individual in a scholarly higher position. Regarding growth opportunities, the student tutors mentioned the development of soft skills and teamwork, improvement in performing reading and writing tasks in their undergraduate programs, and opportunities to increase their knowledge in other fields. The discussions presented in this paper contribute to tutors’ training and to other research on student tutors, as well as to the landscape of what writing centers do in the domain of international publishing. In the U.S., writing centers emerged from labs and clinics (Carino, 1995) and were a resource for college writing assistance for undergraduate students from the 1970s on. However, this is not a common scenario in Brazilian high schools or higher education institutions. Universities in Brazil originated in the 1900s, meaning that higher education is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Brazilian educational system was established based on a “banking model of education” (Freire, 1970/2007), a metaphor used to describe students as containers into which educators must deposit knowledge, reinforcing that knowledge came from outside. Students were not encouraged as creators of new ideas and little was done to develop students’ critical thinking and writing skills, bearing resemblance to the observations made by Mora (2022) on her Mexican context. In this regard, writing centers are not a national reality and are not found in high schools or universities, as most of the writing practice is devoted to the essay students need to write to be accepted in the university entrance exam (Cons & Rezende, 2024; Martinez, 2023). Brazilian undergraduate and graduate students struggle to meet the demands of higher education, accomplishing academic tasks such as an undergraduate thesis and writing for publication without the help or the culture of pursuing the assistance of a writing center. Additionally, the pressure to publish internationally is an obstacle that faculty and graduate students must face, especially since high-impact journals publish in English and the Brazilian population is not bilingual. English language schools are profitable businesses in Brazil as compulsory education does not provide proper conditions for learning foreign languages. Thus, to cope with this demand, most graduate departments are applying part of their budgets to pay for translation and editing services (Martinez & Graf, 2016). Prof. Ron Martinez observed this scenario at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) and proposed the creation of the first Brazilian writing center – CAPA – Centro de Assessoria de Publicação Acadêmica (Academic Publishing Advisory Center) in 2016 to offer both translation and tutoring services (Martinez, 2023). Through this action, he aimed to apply resources inside the institution and provide academic and professional development to the students and faculty. Following the creation of CAPA, seven other writing centers were established in the state universities of Paraná, Brazil in the second semester of 2021. The writing center at our university is one of them. Since its creation, our center has offered tutoring and translation services, with its staff comprised of a university lecturer as a coordinator and graduate and undergraduate students as tutors and translators. These student tutors use English as a second language and are majoring mainly in English Language and Literature; however, students from other areas are welcome and have been part of the center. The increasing popularity of paid editorial services (Hartwood, 2019; Martinez, 2023) underscores the importance of writing centers offering sophisticated machine learning (ML) editing assistance, ensuring that all individuals may benefit from these services irrespective of financial circumstances. These two realities demonstrate that globalization and internationalization initiatives have influenced the tasks performed by some writing centers. In Brazil, student tutors are mainly involved in translation services from Portuguese to English, editing manuscripts in Portuguese and English, and tutoring undergraduate students in their academic tasks in Portuguese or in English. Performing these responsibilities involves challenges, and as a result, we want to explore the challenges and benefits of working as a tutor. Though inspired by aspects of American models, writing centers in Brazil arise from local needs and contexts that display their distinct histories (Martinez, 2023). They emerge from an internationalization initiative that combines tutoring students on academic assignments and translating Portuguese articles written by faculty and graduate students into English (Cons & Rezende, 2024). There are only three international publications about Brazilian writing centers: Martinez (2023), Cons and Rezende (2024), and Cons et al. (2025). Martinez (2023) explores the emergence and development of writing centers in Brazil, using the author’s experience as the founder of the Academic Publishing Advisory Center (CAPA) at the Federal University of Paraná. Cons and Rezende (2024) conducted their research at CAPA and focused on one particular consultation as a case study. Cons et al. (2025) discuss preliminary tutor impressions about Generative AI and evaluate how formal training on the use of Generative AI has impacted the translation and tutoring practices at CAPA. Even though these three articles present the Brazilian reality, none of them look at student tutors’ perspectives on working at a writing center in Brazil. International publications that focus on tutors (Thompson et al., 2009; Thonus, 2001, for example) have centered their research on the North American context. The current research presents the tutors’ voices on being part of a Brazilian writing center and advances the discussion about how writing centers in Brazil create situated practices with transnational applications (Mora, 2022). To contribute to the landscape of what writing centers do (Jackson & McKinney, 2012), this article addresses the following questions: What are the challenges faced by these student tutors? To what extent do student tutors at one Brazilian writing center perceive their work at the center as beneficial for their individual growth?

Writing centers are a common service to support students in their writing at most colleges and universities in the United States and, within recent years, have become increasingly popular abroad given the global trend to internationalize educational institutions. But what are writing centers like in countries outside the United States? In this article, I review literature on writing centers in Japan to better understand how one EFL context adopts—and adapts —the U.S. writing center model. The findings of this literature review explore obstacles and opportunities that may occur in tutor-tutee interactions and writing center administration. This knowledge is key for personnel in EFL contexts seeking to create and implement writing centers based on those in the American context. Keywords : writing center, Japan, English as a foreign language (EFL) When someone walks into the writing center at a college or university in the United States, they are likely to find a common scene: Two students—one a tutor, the other a tutee—sit together at a table, or perhaps in a cubicle. The two read the tutee’s paper together as the tutor asks questions about structure, thesis, or word choice. It resembles more a conversation between classmates than a lecture from professor to student. But what about writing centers in other countries? Is this a common scene too? Within recent years, writing centers have become more prevalent at colleges and universities in countries where English is not commonly spoken, known as English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts. Often supported by governmental grants, stakeholders in EFL contexts have sought to internationalize their educational institutions by creating programs conducted entirely in English, promoting increased matriculation of international students, and encouraging students and faculty to publish their works in English (LaClare & Franz, 2013; Okuda, 2019b). To support these goals, colleges and universities have turned to the writing center from their American counterparts as a model. One such country where colleges and universities are adopting the U.S. writing center model is Japan. Although the first reported writing center in Japan was founded on an American military base in Tokyo in the 1930s (McMillan, 1986, as cited in McKinley, 2011), it was not until 2004 that a Japanese college or university established a writing center to support students’ English writing (Johnston, Cornwell, & Yoshida, 2010). Since 2004, supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT), numerous Japanese educational institutions have independently created their own writing centers. These writing centers organized across institutions for the first time at the Japan Writing Center Symposium in 2008 and then formed the Writing Centers Association of Japan in 2011 (Fujioka, 2011). According to the Writing Centers Association of Japan (2022), as of December 2022, there were a total of eighteen writing centers as members. Thus, the history of writing centers in Japan is relatively short, and research on them is limited (Fujioka, 2011; Nakatake, 2013). While there has begun more effort to research writing centers in Japan, there is still work to be done. The purpose of this literature review is to explore current research on writing centers at Japanese colleges and universities to better understand how one EFL context adopts—and adapts —the U.S. writing center model. The most recent literature review on this topic that I found is from approximately a decade ago (see Nakatake, 2013); therefore, this literature review seeks to expand previous research by including more recent scholarship into the discussion. By revealing both obstacles and opportunities in adopting the U.S. writing center model in Japan, the findings of this literature review have implications for writing center personnel who may seek to establish writing centers in other EFL contexts.

Writing center scholarship has focused extensively on how to consult with non-native English speakers but often fails to acknowledge the emotional dimensions of consulting with struggling English Language Learners (ELL). Writing center practitioners can more effectively assist ELL writers and support the emotional dimension of their writing experiences by allowing for more discussion of peer tutor techniques that foster a positive view of writing and support foreign language anxiety. Addressing the challenges faced by ELL students can help create more inclusive and comfortable learning spaces. A review of scholarship suggests future writing center scholarship should include more research on the appropriate and manageable peer tutor techniques for combating biases and encouraging ELL students to serve as writing center tutors. Keywords : English language learners, writing center, emotional states, foreign language anxiety, emotional labor, peer-tutor techniques

Writing centers, as communities of practice, often fail to question their own praxis since it is work reinforced by shared ways of knowing and being within a community. However, change cannot occur without examining and challenging assumptions and commonplaces individually and collectively. During a three-year action research study focused on training mostly monolingual tutors to engage in scaffolding and multidirectional learning with ELL, international student writers, commonplaces emerged related to contextual nature of writing, and the role of sentence-level language in tutoring and writing. Using the theoretical constructivist frameworks that inform writing center work, this article examines those commonplaces and connects them to existing interdisciplinary scholarship. While the work of examining and eliminating assumptions is an ongoing endeavor, the action research and consideration of commonplaces have led to tutor education aimed at equipping tutors to empower multilingual writers by encouraging discussions of objectives, options, outcomes, and ownership. Keywords : ELL writers, writing center, writing tutor, commonplaces Although writing centers exist in the overlap of literacy, learning, and language, we have yet to understand this positioning or resolve what it means to support learners who share this intersectional space. In fact, writing center history with ELL writers has been notably problematic. As a larger community, we have othered such writers through tutor education (Moussu, 2013; Nakumara, 2010; Thonus, 2014), non-directive pedagogies, policies restricting or refusing to assist with sentence-level language concerns, and policing of contextual language and literacy practices (García, 2017; Green, 2016; Greenfield, 2019). At the local level, as a writing center administrator, I have spent the better part of two decades fielding repeated tutor and faculty requests for more tutor training for working with ELL writers, as if the writers were the challenge rather than the systems they navigate. In 2019, as part of a doctoral program at Arizona State University, I completed an interdisciplinary three-year, cyclical action research study to improve the ways Brigham Young University’s mostly monolingual, native English-speaking tutors facilitated learning with ELL, international student writers in tutoring sessions. Initial rounds of this IRB-approved study revealed that the tutors felt comfortable instructing and motivating ELL writers, but scaffolding remained a space of uncertainty. This was notable, since scaffolding involves tailoring “the learning process to the individual needs and developmental level of the learner. Scaffolding provides the structure and support necessary to progressively build knowledge” (Kolb et al., 2014, p. 218).  Since scaffolding is central to the experiential, co-constructed learning that occurs in tutorials, I focused my study on a training intervention designed to help tutors improve scaffolding with ELL writers. As part of the training intervention, tutors participated in classroom instruction on the contextual nature of writing, scaffolding, and sentence-level language. Tutors also completed peer and administrator observations and post-observation reflective discussions. The effectiveness of the intervention and improvement with scaffolding was measured by tutor surveys, pre- and post-intervention tutor interviews, tutorial observations, and surveys and focus groups with ELL writers (Bell, 2019). Research results indicated that scaffolding and multidirectional learning and participation improved within tutorials; however, as the semesters and research cycles progressed, it became clear that the disconnect between the mostly monolingual tutors and ELL writers was less about scaffolding and more about unpacking systems and psyches. Scaffolding was a tool to facilitate multidirectional learning, but dismantling deficit thinking and systems of silos was the larger work. In communities of practice, such as writing centers, we often fail to question our own praxis since it is work reinforced by shared ways of knowing and being within a community. However, as Nancy Grimm (2009) noted in an address to the writing center community, “significant change in any workplace occurs when unconscious conceptual models are brought to the surface and replaced with conscious ones” (p. 16). The multiyear action research study resulted in a bound dissertation on a library shelf, but the work of addressing the disconnects between writing tutors and ELL writers continues because it is the work of rattling and revising our commonplaces. Although ELL writers’ and writing tutors’ questions, explanations, and asides were not measured alongside the effectiveness of the training intervention, the commonplaces they exposed revealed the need for ongoing cognitive and affective attention and sent me back to the scholarship where patterns and relationships continued to emerge and inform the work. While the focus of the initial IRB study was a training intervention within a specific writing center, this article focuses on the commonplaces and assumptions about tutors and ELL writers uncovered during the iterative, interdisciplinary research process, including how writing center work involves issues of identity and power dynamics, communities and systems, the contextual nature of writing, and the layers of sentence-level language. This examination of commonplaces offers no concrete solutions but reinforces the importance of objectives, options, outcomes, and ownership as tutors and ELL writers interact in tutoring and learning exchanges.

This article raises awareness of how “we” language in writing centers can be both helpful and oppressive. Specifically, I consider ways that “we” language has the potential to perpetuate oppression by excluding individuals from writing center “we” statements.Using Suhr-Sytsma and Brown’s 2011 “Two-List Heuristic” as a theoretical framework for understanding and responding to oppressive language, I analyze research on the inclusive and exclusive linguistic characteristics of plural pronouns, including “we,” “our,” and “ourselves,” as they relate to writing center work. I then propose ways in which writing center members may construct responses to “we” language that challenges their values, beliefs, and experiences. This article intends to interrogate a common linguistic feature of writing center culture that can prevent its members from “talking back” to the center. Three semesters ago, I began my position as the Associate Director of a writing center in a mid-sized, religiously-affiliated university in the Midwestern region of the United States. Like many spaces in the Midwest, my university is characterized by politeness, whiteness, and football fanaticism—qualities that have been familiar to me since childhood. Although I am 500 miles from my hometown, I am comfortable in this environment where I easily blend in with the crowd: I am a white heterosexual cis-woman of European descent in my late thirties with a Ph.D. I share this information because my background, context, and positionality have certainly shaped the following analysis. On a cold and gloomy afternoon in mid-November of 2021, I held one-on-one meetings in my office with our new writing center tutors to discuss their research paper topics. Naya (pseudonym), a historically underserved undergraduate student tutor, sat across the table from me and began to share the framework of her research interests. She had prepared a proposal to improve our writing center’s tutor training module for working with multilingual students. As a multilingual student herself, Naya’s proposal was exciting and bold: she was interested in studying multilingual tutoring theories in order to create new pedagogical practices for our writing center. I understood Naya’s concern to stem from the myopic generalization of international students by writing center staff that she witnessed during her training. Yet when I asked her about the direction in which she wanted to take her research, her sentiments surprised me. She remarked, “I just don’t know who I am; am I the international student or the tutor? It’s really confusing.” As she went on to explain, her confusion was rooted in the “we” language used by experienced tutors during the tutor training module. When experienced tutors stood at the front of the classroom describing the ways “we work with international students,” Naya felt like she had to choose an identity. As a new tutor, she was supposed to identify with the tutoring “we”: those who work with international students. Yet, she was also the international student “we”: a group external to the tutors who were, at times, problematic for the tutoring “we.” After talking to Naya, I felt certain that although the language of “we” is supposed to create a sense of community and belonging in the writing center, this plural pronoun also has the power to exclude, confuse, and silence voices. As I began to reflect on this conversation, I realized that the language of “we,” “us,” and “our” is everywhere in writing center rhetoric. Our writing center’s mission statement, appointment confirmation notices, and first-time tutor meetings invariably include descriptions of how “we” do things in the writing center. Furthermore, the word “we” is ubiquitous in writing center discourse throughout the United States; language in daily emails on the [wcenter] listserv and publications in writing center journals demonstrate the prevalence of writing center “we” language. Yet this prevalence does not indicate a corresponding predominance of exclusionary plural pronoun use. Likewise, I am not suggesting the impossible or undesirable task of avoiding plural pronoun use. Rather, I want to argue that writing center “we” language is not always comfortable, inclusive, and welcoming. Naya’s confusion over writing center “we” language suggests that the plural pronoun “we” can function as a privileging and excluding language structure in the writing center environment. Thus, practitioners in the field need to be vigilant about examining and adjusting plural pronoun use, and this article will offer ways forward for becoming more vigilant. After Naya and I conversed, she began to pursue research on multilingual tutoring theories, and I began to listen closely for “we” language in our writing center’s discourse. My listening turned into writing when the call for this special issue was announced. The Peer Review editors of this special issue asked: “as writing centers embrace liberatory political stances, and as their users become more diverse and more aware of identity…do consultants, writers, and administrators with minoritized identities have opportunities to talk candidly back to the center?” (Natarajan et al., 2022, para. 5). Naya had taken the step of “talk[ing] candidly back to the center” in proposing improvements to the pedagogy of our writing center’s training course, and she did so as an international student of color at a predominantly white institution (PWI). While talking back to the center requires time, support, a dialogue partner, and disciplinary knowledge, it also fundamentally requires language. It is this linguistic dimension that may provide an obstacle for historically underserved tutors, writers, and administrators to talk back to the center. If individuals with minoritized identities want to identify as the “we” of the writing center and also as the “we” that has been othered, what language is available to the author without making the problem sound self-focused? This analysis of “we” language may provide a window into why some writing center members feel prohibited from talking back to the center. This is not the first time “we” and “them” language has been problematized in writing center scholarship. Denny (2010) describes the pervasive tendency for writing center discussions to use “we” language to subtly dehumanize groups of people by sorting individuals into subjects and objects. He writes that writing center “talks, presentations, and keynotes index Others as objects for whom practical and instrumental learning applies, not figures for whom learning is necessarily transactional and collaborative (“we” can learn from “them,” “they” from “us”)” (p. 5). When “we” language is used to describe the subjective experience of writing center members in contrast with an objective “them,” the “them” group implicitly seems lesser than the “we” group because they are not afforded the same subjectivity of the “we.” For example, if tutors present a training module on working with international students and the tutors say, “we work with them,” this language implies a power dynamic where knowledge is held by tutors and less knowledge is held by international students. However, if the tutors say, “we work together,” the power dynamic shifts to one of equal knowledge or benefit. The “we” language in the latter example does not imply a lesser-than dynamic because the subjectivity of the “we” is afforded to both tutors and international students. Yet the tendency to use “we” and “them” language is more common than shared “we” language, both in speech and in writing. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown (2011) reflect on this phenomenon in the instructional context, where students use exclusive pronouns in papers and class discussions. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown note that students often assume “readers will be from ‘their culture’ when they use pronouns like ‘we,’ ‘us,’ and ‘our’” (p. 26). Such assumptions occur in writing because they are part of thought and speech patterns conditioned by social and cultural interactions. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown remark that breaking these problematic plural pronoun habits is difficult. One of the ways to make it less difficult is to understand the difference between problematic and helpful pronoun use. The use of plural pronoun language in the writing center context is not surprising given the widely discussed adaptation of “we” language to corporate and business settings over the past few decades. This phenomenon has been reviewed and discussed in articles by Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Fast Company. Because many writing centers share characteristics in common with the business world, analyses of plural pronoun language from business management and leadership resources have value in the writing center context. For example, scholars such as Kacewicz et al. (2014) have argued that using “we” language in a collaborative working environment demonstrates an outward focus and concern for others. This research suggests that individuals whose language reflects a group-oriented rather than self-focused tendency are more likely to attain leadership roles in the group and direct their group toward successful outcomes. Further, according to a study by Anchimbe (2016), a leader who has established rapport with other members of the group can use “we” language to “encourage or reprimand … [to help] members reassert their identity, solidarity, and prowess, restate their mission and determination to achieve it, and also bemoan and caution against [an] unfortunate predicament” (p. 516). Thus, “we” language can create group uplift and positive momentum towards pre-established goals and values. In the writing center, an example of “we” language as a leadership tool would be when a tutor suggests to their peers before the start of a shift: “let’s keep our earbuds out. That way, we can make sure to welcome tutees when they walk in.” Such “we” language directs tutors toward shared values of attention and hospitality. The tutor using the “we” language demonstrates an outward-focused attitude, showing concern for the values of their writing center and for the well-being of tutees who walk in the door. Hence, “we” language can act as a communication tool for group perspective-taking in the writing center. Yet corporate and business literature also warns against the potentially coercive nature of “we” language. For example, in his critique of the Harvard Business Review’s push for “we” language, Walpole (2018) argues that “we” language is used to “manipulate reality” (Improving Communication and Community section, para. 2). Its most offensive manipulation, according to Walpole, is that “we” language creates a false sense of team. Suggesting that “we” landed a deal or “we” gave a fantastic presentation when only one person acted sets up a disingenuous sense of team where no interpersonal bonding is expected. Likewise, “we” language allows a group to take credit when the credit is really due to an individual. Such behavior hearkens back to harrowed days of group work in high school when one person completed the brunt of the work on behalf of the rest of the group. Walpole argues, “did *you* really have much to do with landing the deal? If not, trying to share in the credit isn’t so noble” (Saying “We” is a Poor Substitute section, para. 6). In the business setting, this misuse of “we” language can be used to inflate a leader’s accomplishments while diminishing the success of those under the leader’s purview. When a leader shares collective credit for the success of an individual’s work under the guise of “we” language, the leader becomes a gatekeeper for the growth and promotion of their direct reports. Similarly, in the writing center, an administrative team needs to be discerning about its use of “we” language in creating a sense of team and in acknowledging individual accomplishments. I have briefly shared the surface-level arguments about the benefits and drawbacks of “we” language in the writing center. In the rest of the article, I consider ways that “we” language has the potential to perpetuate oppression by excluding individuals from writing center “we” statements. At stake in this article’s examination of “we” language is an understanding of the potential impact of plural pronoun use on tutoring pedagogy in two sets of relationships: administrators → tutors, and tutors → tutees. The theoretical framework I use for analyzing plural pronoun language in the writing center is guided by four principles from Suhr-Sytsma and Brown’s (2011) “Two-List Heuristic for Addressing Everyday Language of Oppression” (p. 22). While “we” language is not necessarily always oppressive, Suhr-Sytsma and Brown contend that “an individual’s uses of oppressive language are often both unintentional and inseparable from broader discourses that reinforce oppression” (p. 14). As I discovered in conversation with Naya, the “we” language used during our writing center’s training module was unintentionally oppressive and nearly invisible because it was so ingrained in the regular discourse of the writing center. In light of this focus on commonplace discourse, I find four of the eighteen items in Suhr-Sytsma and Brown’s two-list heuristic particularly relevant for analyzing “we” language. To assist in clarity during analysis, I have added (a) and (b) notations after the original numbers in the two lists so that when the heuristic numbers are indicated later in this article, it will be easier to remember from which list the item came. Thus, this article will examine “we” language in relation to the following elements of the heuristic:

This reflection offers an example of how one Writing Center director decided to approach antiracism through practices of mindfulness. Rather than a “how-to guide,” it encourages practitioners to think about what would work best for their contexts and offers a couple flexible activities one could adapt for their center at any given time. On June 19, 2020, Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts observed Juneteenth for the very first time in its 100-year history. There was music, guest speakers, and about 300 virtual attendees who not only listened but also participated in challenging break-out discussions. Although I had only been hired as the Director of the Writing Center for less than a year at the time, I could tell it was an important historic moment for the Babson community, and it further cemented my commitment to ensuring that our Writing Center be an explicitly antiracist space on campus. Essentially, like many of us have felt over the course of 2020, it was another one of those “What can I do?” moments, and it felt incredibly urgent. With so much feeling out of my control and so much energy going towards immediate concerns over funding and safety, I turned to practices of mindfulness to ground the clouds of thought that were continually generating questions of what and how . I turned to breathing and writing, eventually making lists of the steps I could take: review the literature, talk to colleagues, survey my staff’s interest in pursuing this work with me, and reflect on my own position and motivations. For each task on the list, I broke it down into smaller steps I could take, realizing that, while the exigence was there, it didn’t have to happen in a day. That’s when it hit me: perhaps mindfulness could be the key. When hearing the word mindfulness, one might imagine a practice of “clearing your mind”; however, rather than pushing thoughts away, the goal of mindfulness is to be fully present—to be fully aware of one’s thoughts, feelings, and sensations of the body. This can be difficult, especially when experiencing difficult emotions, but our bodies are built with internal rhythms to help us relax and reduce spikes in cortisol (the stress hormone). Certainly, tools like guided meditation and movement can help when we cannot focus, but mindfulness offers something much simpler and accessible: slowing down and allowing space for your mind and body to connect, which could involve taking three intentional breaths or pausing for a few minutes to notice the sound outside your window. Mindfulness involves an intention and a goal to self-regulate—to honor one’s embodied thoughts and feelings before acting. Theories and practices of mindfulness complement many of the tenets of writing center work in important ways regarding student emotion (see Johnson, 2018; Kervin & Barrett, 2018), mentoring current tutors (see Concannon et al., 2020; Mack & Hupp, 2017), and training new tutors (see Emmelhainz, 2020; Featherstone, Barrett, & Chandler, 2019; Godbee, Ozias, & Tang, 2015). Although the scholarship cited here paints a picture of something relatively new, we understand that contemplative practices have been a part of human existence for millennia. In times of trouble, it is not uncommon for a person to deeply reflect on a situation whether through breathing, meditation, prayer, writing, or other modes of thought. Similarly, a review of the literature may suggest that attention paid to writing centers and antiracism is relatively new (see especially the International Writing Centers Association’s antiracism annotated bibliography prepared by Godbee, Olson, & the SIG Collective, 2014) though we’ve long known in this field that the same systems that have allowed writing centers to flourish are some of the very same systems that perpetuate oppression. As a POC, I have had to think about my own complacency in such systems and consider how I can do better. Can we have a “cathartic repudiation of white supremacy” at Babson (Coenen et al., 2019)? How do I embrace the “willingness to be disturbed” (Diab et. al, 2013)? What informs an explicitly antiracist center? Given this topic explicitly centers around bodies, and thoughts and emotions associated with bodies, a potential entrance into this conversation could start from within our own bodies. In their article “Reflections on/of Embodiment: Bringing Our Whole Selves to Class,” Trixie Smith et al. (2017) explain that embodiment scholarship “works to continually remind readers, writers, researchers, and pedagogues that bodies matter to the paradigms, perspectives, relations, and decisions one has in a given situation” (p. 46). Like with teaching—and perhaps even more given the interpersonal proximity and less hierarchical relationship—tutoring professionals cannot separate the mind from the body in this work. Since bodies feel and then act on those emotions, it is important to reiterate Micciche’s (2007) argument that bodies do emotions; emotions do not just happen. Moreover, Micciche (2002) reminds us that writing projects are “a training ground for emotional dispositions that coincide with gender, race, class, and other locations in the social structure” (p. 438). In essence, writing tutors are always engaging in an emotional space when collaborating with students, which has only furthered my thinking that perhaps mindfulness could be a way to honor our emotions and work together through both the joys and difficulties. As Christie I. Wenger (2020) writes in her chapter on mindfulness from The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration , “Mindfulness helps develop resilience because it emphasizes agency; we practice mindfulness to cultivate resilience as a rhetorical choice and action in collective and communal networks” (p. 262). While I’m certainly not the first to do so, I do find an emphasis on embodiment and mindfulness to be a radical move for our writing center, which I view as a fruitful place for social justice work for reasons articulated by Laura Greenfield (2019) given the ways we are able to question ideas of power, negotiate identities and experiences, and have meaningful engagements wherein we recognize, particularly when working with multilingual students, that “we all stand in some kind of relationship to each other—indeed that our experiences are mutually constituted—but that our experiences differ because we are positioned differently within the systems of power in which we all operate (globally and locally)” (p. 123). That being said, I do think this is easier said than done and that we need more spaces that allow for students and administrators to start from within. In Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy: Social Justice in Higher Education , Beth Berila (2016) discusses the necessity for embodying knowledge. She writes, “One can be an expert on the sociopolitical factors that cause something to happen and still not know how it manifests deep in one’s body or why it produces certain responses in others” (p. 45). In order to undo systemic issues, we need both knowledge and presence; we need both body and mind. We can read articles from scholars like Romeo Garcia (2017) and Asao B. Inoue (2016); we can try to understand the “new racism” that scholars like Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan (2011) have put forth for us; but how do we embody the work especially as non-BIPOCs? Could, as Berila suggests, we make room to excavate ourselves in order to begin to recognize the power dynamics that we benefit from or that sustain our oppression? I started developing a way to do just that—to help our students look inward, perhaps uncomfortably, at the self in relation to our larger goals and communities. This ongoing project draws from practices of mindfulness to engage tutors and students in more-holistic approaches to antiracism in the writing center. It’s based on the idea that shifting a culture takes time, and I share its goals here now—in the middle of it all—not to showcase the findings of such a project but to perhaps inspire those who, like I had been, just aren’t sure where to start (particularly of the mind that we already try to design writing centers to be some of the most welcoming, most inclusive spaces). What are some small, concrete steps we could take based on the contexts of our own centers given the constraints of a global pandemic? As we weren’t building an antiracist center from the ground up, my first step was to get a sense of how my writing consultants viewed race in the Writing Center. When creating the fall schedule, in addition to the typical questions I ask about preferences for hours and if they’d be interested in visiting first-year writing classrooms, I asked consultants to freewrite on a few questions relevant to Fall 2020. Here are the instructions and questions I gave: Please freewrite on the following questions for 2-3 minutes each. With freewriting, I want you to just jot down what comes to your mind—no need to worry about spelling, grammar, or getting it “perfect”; rather, I just want to get a sense of where your head is at before we start working together this fall. Please set a timer so that you don’t spend too much time on this! That being said, if you feel particularly compelled to keep writing, that is fine with me. The answers to the social question elicited some very thoughtful responses as one might imagine when thinking of their own thoughtful consultants, and, as suspected, there seemed to be a spectrum of students who were clearly interested in talking more and some who weren’t sure what to say. With Berila’s idea of embodying knowledge for social justice in mind, I planned to have consultants look inward by examining their own thoughts on race before moving our way to examining the larger forces at work within our institutional context. I had my first decision to make: do I fold this work into our regularly scheduled staff meetings, or should this be a separate series of workshops? As no one was studying abroad or otherwise taking time away from the Writing Center, I had already decided that having more small-group staff meetings for our much larger staff would be helpful in keeping a sense of community and giving everyone the space to speak, and I took my own advice to start small. When creating our small groups that would meet every other week to talk about tutoring, I asked for preferences on foci, which included antiracism, marketing, and online tutoring strategies. We had a core group of students who wanted to talk about antiracism and the Writing Center, and I figured we could co-construct ways to talk about race on a larger level with the whole staff eventually. Inspired by the article “Talking Justice: The Role of Antiracism in the Writing Center” (Coenen et al., 2019), I recreated a version of an activity from the antiracist workshop the authors described. I asked my consultants to freewrite on when they first became aware of race as a concept. After the time was up, I then asked that everyone turn their writing into a six-word story (or thereabouts) that we would share anonymously. In the workshop described by Coenen et. al (2019), participants wrote their six-word stories anonymously on sticky notes, which were stuck along the walls of the room; participants then walked around the room and responded to the stories, again anonymously with sticky notes, before having a larger conversation. Given our online environment, I used Pinup , a free online sticky note generator that allowed participants to be anonymous . Each participant typed their story onto their own individual sticky note. Then I let them comment on each other’s posts by simply typing below the original story. With permission, here are some of the stories we shared: Again, imagining your own consultants, you might have a sense of how compassionate they were with one another’s words and how much thought these short, gentle excavations could reveal when we started thinking about them more deeply. While my intention was to simply talk about what we noticed overall, some students took ownership over their stories—“Okay, that one was mine”—and generously answered questions. As my main goal for this project is to start by meeting consultants where they are in terms of their discomfort with looking inward and gently excavating to better understand the larger systems of oppression that most likely benefit the majority of our staff and students, my expected goal is for all individuals involved with the Writing Center to take one small step forward in being mindful of their current contexts. To meet this goal, we’ll continue integrating writing and discussion activities to investigate the role that race plays in writing and interpersonal communication. Although we do need staff meeting time to talk about tutoring, I have to prioritize these types of discussions to slowly shift the culture of students currently working there. The end goal is to gently excavate our embodied experiences surrounding social justice issues in order to challenge our own practices while potentially also implementing more structural shifts in our center. I see this happening on three levels to start—in our ongoing professional development (staff meetings) for current tutors, in our sessions with students, and in our training for new tutors—though I could see this being of interest to those beyond the center’s immediate reach. In addition to the steps outlined above for current consultants, for students coming in to work on writing assignments, another goal will be to see if a mindful turn inward to thinking of self (i.e. excavating on the fly) will complement their writing processes especially as we see an increase in assignments grounded in social justice. Based on what we learn from our consultants and students, we should eventually be in position to implement changes into the tutor-training practicum—a full semester, advanced course—thus developing an antiracist curriculum that comes from the ongoing experiences of those living and working within the context of our institution as opposed to assuming a one-size-fits-all approach. As a team, we will keep reading, writing, discussing, and excavating in order to develop the kind of center that continually looks in and mindfully builds out.

The University Writing Center (UWC) at The University of Texas at El Paso, located on the U.S-Mexico border, employs mostly tutors who are bilingual, Spanish-English; however, there are a significant number of international tutors with different linguistic backgrounds. Using a qualitative method approach, this article discusses findings from focus groups and interviews with international multilingual student tutors who worked at the UWC. Through our analysis of the data, we found that international tutors face a unique set of challenges, but also bring a wealth of knowledge to working at the writing center. This article focuses on three major themes discussed by participants: varying degrees of confidence, feelings of being othered, and issues related to linguistic diversity that arise during tutoring sessions. Tutors’ experiences in leveraging linguistic and cultural differences prompted the need for the UWC to implement changes to its tutor training and policies to support international tutors. As institutions in the United States become more diverse, writing centers need to challenge who best practices in the discipline were created for and who they serve, all while critically examining how we can leverage the experiences of international tutors to reshape writing center pedagogy. Keywords : international writing tutors; multilingualism; linguistic diversity; Hispanic-Serving Institution; writing center pedagogy; tutor training The University Writing Center (UWC) at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) is located in El Paso, Texas on the U.S.-Mexico border. El Paso, combined with its sister city of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, make it one of the largest bi-national areas in the world. Residents of Juarez frequently commute over the international bridges daily for work; many of these commuters include students at UTEP. UTEP is a Hispanic-Serving Institution where 80% of the student population identifies as Hispanic or Latinx (UTEP, 2019). Furthermore, 20% of these students are students from Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, and an additional 5% of students are international students from around the world (UTEP, 2019). Due to the diverse and complex linguistic and cultural lived experiences of students at UTEP, the UWC is informed by theories on multilingualism, antiracism, and equity. It is often cited that writing centers are not just places that enact marginalization, but centers for those who are often marginalized in academia. The UWC has drawn from these theories to develop its programmatic identity, including its goals, tutor training and pedagogies, and professional development, in order to adopt socially just practices. This work, and the theories motivating the work at the UWC, serve as a direct response to our institution and to the students it supports. In a typical semester, the UWC assists over 8,000 students with their writing. The UWC offers face-to-face and synchronous online tutoring, employing about 30 writing tutors, undergraduate and graduate. The undergraduate writing tutors are all hired directly by the UWC, and the graduate students are those who have been awarded a master’s or doctoral teaching assistantship through the English Department or the Creative Writing Department. This year alone, over 40% of the 30+ tutors working at the Writing Center are international students and bi/multilingual with languages ranging from Spanish to Nepalese. Needless to say, this creates a linguistically and culturally diverse work environment as international writing tutors assist students with their writing at the center. This diversity of languages is at the core of our approach to training and pedagogy for writing center tutors. An intricate dynamic develops between writing center tutors and students who often have different home languages, many of whom are English language learners often working towards enacting Academic English as their writing assignments require. While the majority of writing center pedagogy focuses on how to tutor English as a Second Language students and many tutoring books include chapters on working with ESL students or multilingual writers (Bruce & Rafoth, 2009; Gillespie and Lerner, 2009; Ryan & Zimmerelli, 2015; Bruce & Rafoth, 2016; Lape, 2020), very little has been written on the experiences of international tutors from the tutor side. This project started in 2017 when the UWC Director and Assistant Directors were approached by several international students who had been writing tutors, one who is currently the Assistant Director of the UWC and co-author of this piece, asking how training would account for the linguistic differences between the new students joining us from Nepal and the majority of the Spanish speaking students who visited the writing center. Through multiple conversations with international student tutors about their experiences working at the UWC, we were confronted with addressing the following questions: What are the experiences of international tutors working at the UWC? How do non-native English speakers navigate assisting students who are native English speakers, or, in the case of our institution, many non-native English speakers with a different home language? The UWC’s week-long training at the beginning of each academic year includes an entire day focused on tutoring multilingual students, with a larger emphasis on Spanish speakers and writers. However, this was a destabilizing question and set us on the path to try and learn about the experiences of international tutors working at the writing center. In an effort to learn how international writing center tutors navigate concerns about language usage, the UWC needed to reconceptualize training to better account for linguistically and culturally diverse interactions during tutoring sessions. Our article’s contributions to both this special issue and the writing center community opens with an overview of the theories which inform our work at the UWC. First, we came to realize that applying writing center theory and best practices in the UWC was problematic, as some of these best practices did not resonate within the context of UTEP and the UWC–a clear indication of the highly contextualized linguistic ecologies of writing centers on college campuses. Most importantly, these best practices were developed from the ground up and informed by the experiences of students and tutors. Next, we provided a brief description of our study and data collection process. We then structured our data findings into three themes: varying degrees of confidence, feelings of being othered, and issues related to linguistic diversity that arise during tutoring sessions. Lastly, after discussing the most insightful aspects of our findings and how they informed changes to tutoring training at UWC training, we offer readers insight for how writing centers can reconceptualize and reframe the linguistic and cultural knowledges of international tutors as rich resources to learn from, and move away from the deficit rhetoric that has traditionally circulated about non-native English tutors.

This study explores the identity construction of an individual multilingual writing center tutor in tutoring sessions at an American university. Discourse analysis approach is applied to analyze this multilingual tutor’s language use when interacting with his tutees. The findings indicate that the participant tutor takes on multiple identities: a writing center tutor, a negotiator and collaborator, and a language ambassador. These identities are contingent, fluid, and multifaceted depending on the interactions between the tutor and his tutees. Furthermore, this participant tutor’s identities are co-constructed in the interactions with his tutees through the incorporation of his multilingual resources, and through language and linguistic features which are assigned social meanings by writing center communities. Keywords : multilingual tutor, identity construction, writing center, language indexicality

Writers for whom English is a second language (L2) are thought to benefit from tutors who function in an informant role in which they provide cultural, rhetorical, and linguistic information that L2 writers sometimes lack. While this approach is intuitively satisfying because L2 writers may have gaps in their schematic knowledge of English or related rhetoric and culture, researchers have yet to ask students whether they want informant-tutors or to compare student preferences across language backgrounds. In this study, I operationalized three types of information tutors might supply: rhetorical, cultural, and linguistic. Students from across the U.S. ( N =200) who had recently attended a writing tutorial completed a survey asking them to rate the relative importance of several sub-skills within each informant category. The students were further categorized as L1, L2, or Generation 1.5 writers based on responses to an extensive demographic section. Results show that all groups felt it was important for tutors to be informants with almost no significant variation across language groups. These findings emphasize that all writers want academic information and suggest that tutors should provide this irrespective of a student’s language background. Keywords : L2; Generation 1.5; Rhetorical; Cultural; Linguistic; Informant; Writing Center

As linguistic diversity increases on American campuses, writing center staffs are also becoming more diverse— although there has been little empirical research about non-native English speaking (NNS) tutors. Concerns about the native speaker fallacy, although prevalent in TESOL literature, are less documented in writing center studies. The primary purpose of this study is to determine what, if any, differences exist between the tutoring methods of native English-speaking (NES) and non-native English speaking (NNS) tutors and whether some of these differences might be ascribed to linguistic bias. In this study, eight writing center tutors, four NES and four NNS, were observed during sessions with one NES and one NNS writer each. Sixteen naturalistic sessions were transcribed and triangulated with interviews and exit surveys with all participants. Tutor language t-units from these sessions were coded into four broad categories and seven sub-categories. The results indicate that while NES and NNS tutors generally use similar types of language while tutoring, the NES tutors are more directive with NNS writers, reflecting traditional writing center training. NNS tutors are more directive overall, but are especially directive with NES writers. Results also indicate that, despite popular wisdom to the contrary, NNS tutors are less emotionally responsive while working with NNS writers than with native English speakers. The tutors and writers in this study did not indicate the native speaker fallacy as greatly impacting their sessions. Keywords : Non-native speakers of English, peer tutoring, writing, native speaker fallacy

While writing center scholarship has explored useful methods for helping the university-level English language learner (ELL) as well as the high school writer, there is little scholarship examining how writing centers can serve the high school ELL population. While university students must succeed in their university classes, high school students in 42 states must succeed within the Common Core English Language Arts classroom. The differing requirements between the two make it important to focus on the specific needs of peer writing tutors working with high school English language learners. This article applies Stanford University’s Understanding Language Initiative’s “Six Key Principles for ELL Instruction” to the high school writing center as a means of facilitating peer tutors to help the ELL writer with Common Core-based writing assignments. Each principle is examined in turn to consider the ways each intersects with previous writing center scholarship to help the high school English language learner. Keywords : high school writing centers, Common Core, English language learners Writing center scholarship has explored fruitful practices for helping non-native English speaking students at the university level (Bell & Youmans, 2006; Blalock, 1997; Bruce & Rafoth, 2009; Chiu, 2011; Enders, 2013; Nakamaru, 2010; Nan, 2012; Powers, 1993; Vallejo, 2004; Weirick, Davis, & Lawson, 2017). A growing number of resources seeks to provide guidance for the high school writing center director (Ashley & Shafer, 2006; Childers, 1989; Fels & Wells, 2011; Tobin, 2010; Upton, 1990). However, no such examination has been made of best practices for helping English language learners (ELL) in their high school writing center. While existing scholarship on both university non-native English writers and the high school writer can be applied to the ELL high school writer, an added complication for high school ELLs exists in the form of the Common Core English Language Arts Standards. Rather than achieving university requirements, high school ELL students in 42 states (and in a growing number of English-medium secondary schools in other countries) must succeed within the Common Core classroom. The differences between university requirements and the requirements of the Common Core make relying on existing writing center scholarship inadequate. For example, with the narrow exception of remedial classes, many writing requirements at the university level assume students have mastered the kinds of writing skills students learn in high school. While Common Core writing skills are meant to prepare students for university, high school students command only emergent skills in these areas. English language learners contend with even greater challenges, as many do not possess the language skills that their university counterparts have had to prove through entrance exams like the TOEFL. Therefore, targeted, specific guidelines regarding the high school ELL tutoring session are needed to help this demographic make greater academic gains. Currently, only one article outlines the connection between the high school writing center and the Common Core English Language Arts Standards (Horan, 2015), and it does not address ELL students’ specific needs. With 4.6 million non-native English speakers in public schools across the United States (National Center for Education Statistics, 2017), not to mention the 40% increase in the last five years in the number of English-medium high schools across the globe, many of which are beginning to adopt a U.S. curriculum (Morrison, 2016), supporting ELLs with Common Core-based writing assignments is imperative. As the director of a writing center serving a population of 100% ELLs in an English-medium high school in Guangzhou, China, that adheres to the Common Core State Standards, I have asked myself how my tutors can best help their clients. To address this gap in knowledge within my own writing center, I applied research from Stanford University’s Understanding Language Initiative, synthesized in a document entitled “Six Key Principles for ELL Instruction” (Stanford Graduate School of Education, 2013). These six principles are guidelines that seek to help instructors plan their curriculum in a way that allows language learners to access Common Core-based content at the same time they build English language competency. Figure 1 below lists the six principles, and the article then continues with a consideration of several strategies that high school writing center peer tutors who serve ELL students—within the U.S. or abroad—can use to alleviate some of their biggest challenges as they implement the six principles in their sessions. Principles One and Two have proven to be the least challenging to implement in the writing center. Principle One indicates that classroom instruction ought to give ELLs the opportunity to talk about discipline-specific topics and concepts in English so as to build both understanding of the content area and understanding of the English language simultaneously. Principle Two advises instructors to use ELLs’ home language, culture, and background knowledge to build off of what students already know, thereby providing them with a firm foundation on which to construct new knowledge. The nature of writing center work has meant that in its simplest form, tutors help clients build both content and language knowledge by talking about an assignment in English. Likewise, because my tutors are Mandarin speakers, they can easily leverage clients’ home language by speaking Mandarin as necessary, a practice already shown to be effective in the writing center (Ronesi, 2009) and which U.S. directors can implement by recruiting multilingual writers from within their schools. I have found the principles that most challenge my tutors are Three through Six. Principle Three states that instruction should put scaffolds in place to help ELLs reach grade-level standards (Donato, 1994; van Lier & Walquí, 2012). In a 2014 article, John Nordlof notes that there are two fundamental types of scaffolding that occur during writing center sessions, those of cognitive scaffolding and those of motivational scaffolding. In cognitive scaffolding, the tutor helps the clients discover problems on their own. Examples of this kind of tutor talk are prompting students with open-ended questions, responding to essays as a reader, and demonstrating a concept, among others (Mackiewicz & Thompson, 2014, p. 68). In motivational scaffolding, the tutor helps to create a supportive learning space for clients. Examples of this kind of tutor talk include showing concern for the client, praising a client, showing sympathy or empathy, and reinforcing a client’s ownership of their essay (Mackiewicz & Thompson, 2014, p. 71). To help scaffold our own clients in the ways mentioned above and thereby implement the third principle, I train tutors to employ each of these methods during their sessions. The real challenge for our tutors’ ability to scaffold, however, comes in knowing which of these methods to use and when to use it. To help our students make these decisions, my co-director and I developed a flow chart (Figure 2) that we post in the writing center. Tutors can refer to it as their sessions unfold so that they can make appropriate scaffolding decisions. As tutors and clients then engage in conversations between real readers and writers, clients receive reinforcement when they do well and empathetic guidance where they fall short. In so doing, tutors can effectively implement the third principle to scaffold students to achieve the next level of competence toward full proficiency in the standards. While scaffolding students, whether through cognitive or motivational methods, can lead students to success, knowledge of students’ previous experiences are equally as important to aiding clients. In considering background knowledge, Principle Four is twofold: It states that instruction should “[move] ELLs forward by taking into account [both] their English language proficiency level(s) and prior schooling experience” (Stanford Graduate School of Education, 2013). Because I work in a Chinese writing center, where all students speak Mandarin but learn English, we have the advantage in that our tutors share the same home language as their clients. To meet the first injunction, then, that of taking the language ability of clients into account, I encourage the tutors to use Mandarin in their sessions as necessary, as mentioned under Principle Two (Ronesi, 2009). However, Principle Four helps tutors to be thoughtful and intentional about when to use Mandarin and when to use English with their clients. To help tutors make these kinds of decisions, I guide discussions during training to help tutors understand the purposes that they have for using each language. Many of our students, particularly those in grades seven through nine, do not have the language proficiency to show the depth of thought required for their assignments. While certainly a challenge for these students, it also presents a challenge for our tutors, whose job is to help them overcome these kinds of hurdles. When they are helping a client of a lower English ability, it may be more helpful for the client to converse in Mandarin so that their thoughts can flow freely, uninhibited by an unfamiliar medium of communication. However, when the client is capable of expressing themselves with relative ease in English, it can be more helpful to hold a session in English for the same reason, to encourage a freer flow of thought than is able to happen when energy is spent translating ideas back and forth between the two languages. Following Peter Carino’s (2003) advice to take a more directive approach with inexperienced writers, I have trained tutors to use Mandarin more with younger learners (grades seven through nine), and English with more advanced learners (grades 10 through 12). An additional guideline I have given tutors is that if a client of any grade level seems unwilling or unable to engage very deeply in a conversation in English, switch to Mandarin to ensure that language is not the main barrier in conversation. Using Mandarin and English strategically in this way helps to support our students with one of their toughest challenges as language learners (Ronesi, 2009). For high schools in the U.S., the implication of this principle is that directors may find it helpful to prioritize finding multilingual tutors from within their student body. In addition to knowing how and when to use English or Mandarin to address the language needs of clients, tutors must also take into account the client’s prior formal education. For example, there is a difference between the way our students have been taught to write an essay in their Chinese public schools and the way Western academic readers will expect to read an essay. Because our students attend the school in order to prepare themselves to succeed in a Western academic environment, we must train tutors to address these differences. A basic understanding of contrastive rhetorical theory can aid us in this endeavor (Quinn, 2012). We take a direct look at some of the differences in the expectations between Western academic essays and Chinese academic essays during training, allowing tutors to take on a more directive role as is appropriate for working with language learners and as tutors who have more knowledge in the subject area (Carino, 2003; Nan, 2012). In their sessions, they can then say to a client, for example: Pointing out these differences is a way our tutors can address students’ previous academic formation. Conversely, our clients’ previous education can also serve as a well-aligned foundation to their current learning. Tutors can show the similarities between what they have been required to do before and what they are required to do for their present assignments. For instance, Chinese writing education has traditionally taught students to use others’ writings as a model and a scaffold for learning to write well. The citation of those words is not considered necessary in student writing (Chou, 2010, p. 38). This can result in what the North American academy considers plagiarism. To help their clients learn citation rules, our tutors can take what our students already know—that using someone else’s words can be useful to one’s own writing—and add to it the idea that in the West, one must give credit to the original writer for the use of those words. This kind of tutor talk uses the client’s knowledge of essay writing for one particular audience to help him be a more flexible writer who can reach audiences across cultures (Ede & Lunsford, 1984). These two strategies of intentionally noting both the differences and similarities between clients’ previous education and their current education helps our tutors to make use of what the client already knows. Principle Four does not require that tutors speak the same native language as their clients, and for that reason, it is easier to implement in U.S. high school writing centers than Principle Three. Writing center directors simply need to introduce their tutors to basic contrastive rhetoric in order to give them the tools they need to successfully implement Principle Four. While taking background knowledge and scaffolding methods into consideration during sessions, writing center tutors must also remember that the purpose for those strategies is to help the clients make independent choices in their writing. Principle Five encourages educators to foster their students’ autonomy by giving them strategies to understand and use language for their needs (Stanford Graduate School of Education, 2013). Writing centers can implement this principle by training tutors to let clients maintain control of their autonomy during a session. During tutor training, I make a point of reminding tutors to let the client hold the pencil (with the one exception being during a brainstorming session when it may be helpful for the tutor to have the pencil and write down the client’s ideas as they are speaking) (Bruffee, 1984; Clark, 1990; Cogie, 2001; Shamoon & Burns, 1995). For many students in both domestic and international settings who have been accustomed to a teacher-centered classroom, this can feel awkward at first (Nan, 2012) and has proven to be a stumbling block for my tutors, who automatically pick up a pencil when their sessions start. This may be to help themselves feel more confident, assuming the role of the authority figure they sometimes feel they need to be. Indeed, clients do come in expecting that they will be told what to write and how to “fix” their papers. However, with explanations for the reasons to hand over the pencil to the client, a visual reminder on the flow chart posted in the center to let the client hold the pencil, as well as increased self-efficacy after several sessions, tutors gradually become more comfortable in the role of a peer. They remember to hand over the pencil to the client at the beginning of a session, a sign and a symbol of handing the power over to the client. Another option may be to simply remove pens or pencils from the writing center, forcing clients to get out a pen or a pencil themselves. When clients are the ones writing the most, it, in effect, puts them in charge of the session, fostering their autonomy (Brookes, 1991). Reminders, both verbal and visual, can help reinforce this practice in our tutors so that ELL students have full autonomy over their learning. Finally, although writing center tutors want their clients to have autonomy and independence in their learning, writing centers are always necessary for writers of all levels to receive formative feedback. Principle Six states that teachers should use formative assessment to measure a student’s content knowledge and language competence (Stanford Graduate School of Education, 2013). In their article “Formative Assessment and the Paradigms of Writing Center Practice,” Joe Law and Christina Murphy (1997) highlight the ways that formative assessment and writing center theory intertwine. They write, “The almost century-long history of writing centers attests to an inquiry-based, individualized pedagogy directed toward the primary aims of formative assessment in providing in-process commentary that offers direction, guidance, and analytical critique to emerging writers” (Law & Murphy, 1997, p. 106). We can train our tutors to serve as a step in this process by being real readers who ask real questions of their clients’ essays. What parts do they find confusing? Where do they feel more information might be helpful? Has the writer satisfied all the reader’s doubts about the topic at hand? What parts does the reader find interesting, insightful, surprising, or particularly well said? This, in effect, helps the writer see what they have done well, plus where they can continue to improve, and is common writing center practice. Our tutors, however, were hesitant to implement these strategies due to their lack of self-confidence. Coming from an educational environment in which the teacher has always been seen as the center of authority and knowledge, our tutors found it difficult to believe that they had anything to offer their fellow students. They feared that if they read a student’s paper and felt confused, it was an indication that they as tutors were not smart enough or competent enough. This is another area in which contrastive rhetorical theory can be useful, specifically to talk about the differences between a reader-centric and a writer-centric culture. In some cultures, if a reader is confused, it is often an indication that the reader must spend more time pondering the writer’s thoughts. However, in other cultures, the tendency is the opposite. If readers are confused, it is an indication that the writer should explain more clearly (Connor, 2002). While contrastive rhetoric is more complicated than such brief explanations can fully present, an introduction to the idea can help our tutors to know that if they are confused, it is worthwhile to bring this to a client’s attention as a way of focusing the client on places of possible improvement. Such instruction has helped to give our clients more confidence in their ability to provide feedback, especially before they have the opportunity to develop the self-efficacy experience can provide. Tutors both in the U.S. and abroad may find themselves lacking the confidence to provide feedback for a variety of reasons, and an exploration of reader-centric and writer-centric cultures can help give tutors the confidence they need to provide astute, honest feedback to clients that provides the formative assessment so necessary to ELL academic success. As Common Core standards create expectations for college readiness that are ever more rigorous, students who must learn both English and the objectives of their content classes face heavy obstacles to success. Support from many areas is necessary to provide them an effective learning environment. The Six Principles help guide instruction in and out of the classroom so that ELLs can reach proficiency in the standards, and writing centers can play a significant role in supporting the implementation of the Six Principles at a school-wide level. With tutor training that comports with the Six Principles and gives tutors strategies to overcome challenges to their implementation, high school writing centers can offer a strong locus of support for ELLs, equipping them to participate and succeed in a Westernized, North American academic playing field.