This study explores the discursive practices the researcher utilizes during recurring asynchronous writing consultations to engender mutually adjusted and context-driven interactions meaningful to writers’ development during virtual tutoring. While earlier studies have critiqued asynchronous tutoring for its inability to efficiently promote the writing center philosophy, the inevitability of writing centers’ transition to online modes due to the global COVID-19 pandemic warrants that writing center scholarship rethink the effectiveness of these online spaces. This study utilizes a discourse-analytic approach to analyze textual data collected from both WCONLINE and drafts I, the tutor, worked on. Individual interviews are also collected to ascertain writers’ perception of recurring asynchronous writing consultations as conversational. Textual analysis reveals that conversations occur in recuring asynchronous writing consultations on three contextual layers: first is the opening phase; second is the dialogic phase; and third is the closing phase. Interview data also shows that participants perceive their asynchronous sessions as conversational as those sessions not only function to inform, elicit, direct, and suggest, but also promote familiar relationships and provide affirmations. The study concludes by offering recommendations on how to retool the asynchronous writing consultation as not a lesser appointment option but a different option with the same opportunity as traditional writing consultation.

In his book A Working Model for Contingent Faculty, Robert Samuels presents multiple ideas for helping contingent faculty organize to gain equity on campus: in their careers, working conditions, and pay. Samuels critiques current prominent, negative discourse on contingent faculty, offering instead ways to emphasize contingent faculty’s diverse and positive experiences and opportunities. I offer additional insights spurred from Samuels’s ideas, including connecting with student government and finding ways to make writing center work and research more public and apparent to institutional stakeholders (e.g., students, faculty, donors, administrators, boards/trustees).

Corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) is a growing field of study that provides for holistic understandings of written texts, spoken discourse, rhetorical strategies, and the people who use them. Organized as a discussion of the topics, methods, and their potential applications for writing center research, this essay reviews three edited collections, Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review by Charlotte Taylor and Anne Marchi (Routledge, 2018); The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis by Eric Friginal and Jack A. Hardy (Routledge, 2020); and Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis by Camilla Vásquez (Bloomsbury, 2022). Each introduces a range of practices, insights, and concerns for combining corpus and discourse analysis, which can be useful for developing writing center research, consultant training, and administrative outcomes.

Writing center scholars have long debated whether writers are best served by “generalist” tutors trained in writing center pedagogy or “specialist” tutors with insider knowledge about a course’s content or discipline-specific discourse conventions. A potential compromise that has emerged is training tutors in the purposes and features of specific genres. The writing center literature showcases many different approaches to genre training. However, little empirical research, if any, has explored how tutors’ genre knowledge affects session outcomes. The present study used a mixed-methods approach to compare session outcomes for students who worked with generalist and genre-trained tutors. We analyzed pre-consultation and revised literature review drafts to determine whether students who worked with tutors trained in the genre of literature reviews improved their drafts more or revised their drafts differently than students who worked with generalist tutors. Additionally, we performed a qualitative analysis of student reflections about their writing processes to explore how tutor training impacts students’ impressions of their consultations. Findings indicated that students who worked with genre-trained tutors revised their drafts more substantively than did students who worked with generalist tutors. Moreover, students who worked with genre-trained tutors left with notably better and richer impressions of their consultations.

Even small, taken-for- granted words can have a strong influence on the pedagogical effect of a writing conference. In this study, we examined how experienced and trained writing center tutors’ use of the discourse marker so helped them to connect ideas and to manage their conferences with students. We examined the extent to which tutors’ use of six types of so varied according to the English L1 (EL1)/ English L2 (EL2) status of their interlocutor. We studied 26 conferences: 13 involved eight tutors working with 13 EL1 students, and 13 conferences involved eight tutors working with 13 EL2 students. We found that conclusion/ result so occurred most frequently in tutors’ conferences with EL1 and EL2 students and that prompt so was the only type that exhibited a significant difference in frequency of occurrence between the two groups, occurring more frequently in tutors’ talk with EL1 students. We focused our qualitative analysis on prompt so, finding that it served two main purposes. We argue that examining discourse marker so generates implications for tutor training and shows the importance of paying attention to the small, seemingly unimportant words that tutors use.

Writing studies and writing center scholars have recently focused much-needed attention on how graduate student writers are taught, mentored, and supported. This scholarship also points to a persistent and stubborn conundrum: Graduate students must write their way into disciplinary belonging, yet most advisors lack a language for, or even awareness of, the specialized practices and tacit expectations shaping written discourse in their fields. While graduate student–serving writing centers help fill this writing-support gap, a reliance on English and humanities graduate students for staff reproduces a status quo in which the genre awareness and rhetorical vocabulary needed to mentor advanced academic writers are neither widely distributed nor recognized and valued. This essay offers the counterexample of a graduate writing center whose consultants hail primarily from master’s and doctoral programs in the sciences and social sciences. Using feminist social reproduction theory to examine this case study of one graduate writing center, the authors explore how multidisciplinary staffing resists the enclaving of writing process and rhetorical knowledge and points to a future in which the responsibility for mentoring graduate student writers is visible, valued, and shared.

By addressing how writing centers can work to help computer science students be ready for professional challenges related to writing in computer science fields, this study of computer science professionals and students illustrates how findings were applied to train a team of writing tutors. Drawing upon self-reports about writing in computer science jobs and writing in computer science classes, the authors identify both professionals' workplace writing challenges and students' perceptions of these challenges. Implications for writing center practitioners and researchers are discussed, including how writing centers can collaborate with computer science faculty to acquire resources, access the discourse of computer science assignments, and implement a similar training program in their centers.

As online writing tutorials become increasingly widespread, writing center scholars continue to debate the pedagogical differences between face-to-face and online tutoring However, empirical research has lagged behind technological advancement, with only one study (Wolfe & Griffin, 2012) comparing face-to-face and media-rich online writing center tutorials. This article builds on such scholarship by sharing results from a comparative study of face-to-face and synchronous audio-video online tutorials that collected data from writing tutorials, writers' postsession surveys, and interviews with writers. Using primarily linguistic analysis of the hundreds of interactions in each of the 24 transcribed writing tutorials, we determined that audio-video online and face-to-face sessions share similarities in tutoring strategies, discourse phases, tutor-writer interaction, and student satisfaction. However, significant differences were found

Writing centers generally espouse tutoring policies for native speakers intended to help students improve their writing skills through minimalist intervention and a reliance on student intuition. At the same time, researchers have recommended somewhat directive tutorials for L2 writers who may lack native-speaker intuitions about culture or language. Yet the literature is unclear about whether L1, L2, and Generation 1.5 writers observe a difference in writing center practices based on their language background. This study examines the reported expectations and experiences of 462 writing center tutees by grouping them according to their language background (L1, L2, and Generation 1.5) and comparing their expectations with their reported writing center experiences on eight measures of tutorial behavior. Results indicate that all writers reported receiving similar and directive tutorials, a finding that differs from discourse-analytic results. The findings further demonstrate differences in what writers expect, with L1 writers expecting reflective tutorials, Generation 1.5 writers expecting negotiation, and L2 writers expecting directiveness. While necessarily abstract, results can nonetheless be useful in pre-or in-service tutor training in centers with high concentrations of Generation 1.5 or L2 writers.

To better understand interaction between consultants and writers and reveal more about the daily work in writing centers, this exploratory, discourse-based study uses conversation analysis to take an "unmotivated look" at data.Through initial transcription, a new discourse feature, the oral writing-revision space, or OR, emerged.The OR has not been previously identified in either writing center or conversation analysis literature.This emergent discourse feature functions in several important ways, allowing both consultants and writers to navigate the session by taking on more or less responsibility as needed.Further, this research presents the OR as a framework for better understanding interaction and scaffolding in writing center sessions and has implications for tutor training, challenging lore, and discourse-based research.

Although research on tutoring nonnative speaker (NNS) students has grown in the past two decades, many of these studies have either predominantly focused on native speaker (NS) tutors or have been written with the assumption that all tutors are NSs.Thus, NNS tutors have been largely neglected.The purpose of this study is to examine how one NNS student interacts with one NNS tutor and one NS tutor in a writing center at the college level.These two sessions were video-taped, transcribed, and then analyzed in detail using the methodology of conversation analysis.After each session was analyzed, a retrospective interview with the NNS student was conducted to explore her opinions of these tutorials.Interview data shows that the NNS student preferred the NS tutor over the NNS tutor by virtue of their NNS/NS status.The conversation analysis of the actual tutorials, however, reveals that the NNS student preference is likely due to the fact that the NS tutor's

We discuss the benefits of using corpus linguistic analysis, a quantitative method for determining the "aboutness" of talk, in conjunction with discourse analysis in order to understand writing center talk at a micro-and macrolevel. We exemplify this mixed-method approach by examining a specialized corpus of 20 writing center conferences totaling more than 75,000 words. Our analysis also uncovered words that differentiated writing center talk from reference corpora and thus helped reveal the aboutness of the writing center talk. For example, student writers said "I don't know" far more frequently than any other 4-gram, and tutors said "You're going to" far more frequently than other 4-grams. We close by discussing the possibility of creating a corpus of writing center talk that researchers could use to ask and answer a broad range of research questions.

These researchers examine how questions function in a corpus of eleven writing center conferences conducted by experienced tutors. They analyze the 690 questions generated in these conferences: 81% (562) from tutors and 19% (128) from students. Using a coding scheme developed from prior research on questions in math, science, and other kinds of quantitative tutoring, they categorized tutors’ and students’ questions. The researchers found that questions in writing center conferences serve a number of instructional and conversational functions. Questions allow tutors and students to fill in their knowledge deficits and check each other’s understanding. They also allow tutors (and occasionally students) to facilitate the dialogue of writing center conferences and attend to students’ engagement. In addition, tutors use questions to help students clarify what they want to say, identify problems with what they have written, and brainstorm. Based on this analysis, the authors make some recommendations for tutor training. 85891-Writing Center-text.indd 37 3/10/14 2:52 PM Thompson & Mackiewicz | Questioning in Writing Center Conferences 38 Introduction To resist the role of teacher-surrogate in favor of the role of helpful peer or collaborator, to get students to do the talking, and generally to achieve a student-centered focus, tutors have been advised to use questions as primary tutoring strategies in writing center conferences (Brooks; Harris). In other words, tutors are supposed to use questions to indirectly guide students to improving their writing. In these oftenidealistic conceptions of writing center conferences, questions are “real,” genuinely reflecting an interest in who the students are and what they want to say rather than leading students to a particular point of view. Moreover, students’ satisfaction with writing center conferences has been connected to their perceptions of having their questions answered (Thompson, Whyte, Shannon, Muse, Miller, Chappell, & Whigham; Thonus, “Tutor and Student Assessments”). Tutors are supposed to encourage students to ask questions freely, and it is assumed that students will ask more questions in writing center conferences than in the classroom (Harris). However, beyond encouraging students to talk and beyond directing tutors toward students’ areas of confusion, questions are important prompts for learning and for maintaining students’ engagement in writing center conferences. Research about question asking and answering in the classroom has typically focused on how teachers can pose questions to enhance critical thinking for students. This research has shown that the dialogic Socratic method, with its back-and-forth questions and answers, is a more effective teaching strategy than didactic teacher talk (Rose, Bhembe, Siler, Srivastava, & VanLehn; see also Kintsch; Tienken, Goldberg, & DiRocco). Today questioning is one of the most frequently used classroom teaching techniques, with elementary and high school teachers asking as many as 300 to 400 questions per day (Tienken, Goldberg, & DiRocco). Research suggests that if used effectively either in the classroom or in one-to-one tutorials, questions can enhance students’ learning in at least three ways. First, as shown in Socrates’s questioning of his student about the concept of justice, questions can direct students in their efforts to “construct and reconstruct knowledge and understanding” (Smith & Higgins 486). By discussing what they are thinking with a more expert tutor or teacher, students engage in self-explanation, a process shown to deepen their understanding (Chi; Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann, & Glaser; Chi, De Leeuw, Chiu, & LaVancher; Rose, Bhembe, Siler, Srivastava, & VanLehn). Second, questions can enhance students’ motivation, stimulate curiosity, and encourage active participation in learning (Lustick; Smith & Higgins). 85891-Writing Center-text.indd 38 3/10/14 2:52 PM The Writing Center Journal 33.2 | Fall/Winter 2014 39 Third, teachers’ and tutors’ questions may become models for selfquestioning, important for students in regulating their own learning processes. Further, in both the classroom and in tutorials such as writing center conferences, learning typically occurs within a conversational context, and along with stimulating understanding, questions are vital linguistic components of an educational conversation. Besides helping tutors identify what students do not know, questions allow tutors to understand students’ goals for coming to the writing center and to politely facilitate the flow of the tutorial conversation. We will consider all of these types of questions in this article. We examined how questions function in a corpus of eleven writing center conferences conducted by experienced tutors. In these eleven conferences, we found a total of 690 questions, mostly asked by tutors but some asked by students as well. Incorporating research about questions in classroom teaching, we adapted a scheme for analyzing questions in tutorials that was developed by the psychologist and linguist Arthur C. Graesser and his associates. This scheme has been used to analyze questions in math, science, and other kinds of quantitative tutoring, with a range of students from elementary school to college (Golding, Graesser, & Millis; Graesser, Baggett, & Williams; Graesser, Bowers, Hacker, & Person; Graesser & Franklin; Graesser & McMahen; Graesser & Olde; Graesser & Person; Graesser, Person, & Huber; Graesser, Person, & Magliano; Graesser, Roberts, & Hackett-Renner; Person, Graesser, Magliano, & Kreuz). Through our analysis, we show how questions can function in writing center conferences so that we and our tutors can understand the potential impact of questions on students’ learning and, subsequently, pose questions more consciously. Previous research about questions in writing center conferences has focused on what questions reveal about tutors’ roles and control over conferences. For example, Kevin M. Davis, Nancy Hayward, Kathleen R. Hunter, & David Wallace analyzed four types of “conversational moves” (47) teachers use in classroom discourse—structuring the interaction, soliciting responses, responding, and reacting—to determine the extent to which tutors took on teacher roles. According to Davis, Hayward, Hunter, & Wallace, tutors are usually in control of conferences, but sometimes they do assume less teacher-like and more conversant-like roles (see also Willa Wolcott’s “Talking It Over: A Qualitative Study of Writing Center Conferencing”). Susan R. Blau, John Hall, & Tracy Strauss considered the nature of the collaboration that occurs in writing center conferences by analyzing “three recurring rhetorical strategies” (22) relating to tutors’ directiveness—questioning, echoing, and using qualifiers. They found that in conferences considered satisfactory, tutors 85891-Writing Center-text.indd 39 3/10/14 2:52 PM Thompson & Mackiewicz | Questioning in Writing Center Conferences 40 demonstrated “informed flexibility” (38) in the strategies they used. Other studies have evaluated tutors’ use of mitigated and unmitigated interrogatives (Thonus, “Dominance in Academic Writing Tutorials”), “question–answer interrogation sequences” (Thonus, “What Are the Differences” 231), and leading versus open questions (Severino). A few studies have included questions in analyzing tutors’ politeness strategies (Bell & Youmans) and self-presentation (Murphy). These studies of writing center conferences tend to analyze questions as signals of assumed role and that role’s concomitant right to control the discourse as opposed to examining all the ways questions can function—including but not restricted to the ways they help construct role and maintain control. We analyzed questions to determine the extent to which experienced tutors ask questions that push students’ thinking, check their understanding, facilitate conversation, and model the types of questions students should ask of themselves in order to assess and develop their own writing. Simultaneously, we speculated on the relationships between questioning and students’ and tutors’ roles. After delineating the question types we found, we examined question-answer patterns according to initiation-response-evaluation (IRE) instructional dialogue (Mehan), a classroom discourse pattern largely unexamined in writing center research (for an exception, see Porter). We examined writing center variations on the IRE pattern, showing how experienced tutors used different types of leading and scaffolding questions in tandem with common-ground questions in a cycle of promoting students’ thinking and engagement and of checking students’ comprehension.

Her current research interests are in the areas of the effectiveness of writing center rhetoric and the implications of individualized instruction as a defining writing center principle.

In Plato's famous critique of writing in the Phaedrus , Socrates declared writing a deficient form of communication next to speech, for any piece of writing, should it fall into the hands of an unintended reader, is susceptible to misinterpretation. He likened texts to orphans, who, upon separation from their authorial progenitors, wander about as message -bearing waifs. Obligated to stay on script, they can but parrot their parents' words, having no recourse to gloss, emendation, or retort.1 One of the virtues of writing centers is that they compensate for the alienation of writing. If the canonical literate encounter is one where writer and reader, separated in time and space, meet only through the medium of the text, then the writing center consultation restores immediacy to written communication. In its traditional form, the tutorial brings

7o be fully human is to know the joint construction of reality. Largely, for most people , this is constructed through discourse , because talk is central to everyday life....[I]nterweaving bits and pieces of your own and others talk is the pmary mode of creating a sense of your own place in the world

Even as writing centers have proliferated across American campuses, writing center discourse has been characterized by deep uncertainty. In a provocative, signature moment, Terranee Riley in his 1994 article "The Unpromising Future of the Writing Center" took a retrospective look at the writing center movement and made a gloomy prediction of its future. What he feared most was that the revolutionary potential of writing centers was ending, about to be replaced by a bland era of "business as usual" (21). This would happen because writing centers would progress in finding an "institutional niche" (26). Riley noted that academic disciplines go through developmental stages before achieving institutional recognition, and he recalled how the early teaching of American literature lacked an academic status equal with the study of British and ancient classics. Unfortunately, in Riley's view, once American literature gained recognition as an academic field, it lost an initial, non-elitist, "revolutionary energy"

It will come as no surprise, perhaps, to say that writing centers have long been grounded in -some would say "bounded by" -the conventions of printed text. True, writing centers, like most of the rest of the world, have been influenced by advances in computer technology, most recently through the explosive growth of Online Writing Labs (OWLs) and computer-mediated conferencing with students, but fundamentally, most of the interactions between students and tutors still center on the handwritten or printed texts that are placed on a table between them or, perhaps, shared in a wordprocessed file. These texts are structured linearly and hierarchically, moving along a single path from beginning to end, following well-known and universally taught discourse forms that have emerged from a print -based rhetorical tradition.

Over the past ten years or so, much has been written about whether writing center tutors should be generalists or specialists: when tutors help clients from other disciplines, is it an asset for the tutors to be familiar with discipline-specific discourse conventions? Scholarship attempting to answer this question has been bi-polar: either tutors should be generalists, or they should be specialists. On the specialist side, some scholars argue that tutors’ knowledge of discipline-specific discourse conventions is important to the success of tutoring sessions, since the tutoring should revolve around the rhetoric of the discipline (Kiedaisch and Dinitz; Tinberg and Cupples: Shamoon and Burns). Judith Powers and Jane Nelson, for example, argue that

Given their knowledge of the workings of language, few writing center professionals would doubt that material history is always more complex than the discourse that strives to record it. And most would certainly recognize that historical discourse constructs the past at least as much as it records it. Despite this dilemma, writing center scholars recently have given increased attention to writing center history.

People who work in writing centers often fall prey to professional insecurity. We feel misunderstood and unappreciated in our own departments (if we even have department) and in the larger academy. Our marginal status makes us feel exploited by those with more institutional power and vulnerable in times of retrenchment. Our insecurity has led, as Thomas Hemmeter observes, to ongoing attempts at self-definition. Since no one else recognizes or understands us, we feel the need to continually announce and invent ourselves. And we do so, says Hemmeter, through "a discourse articulated in dualities," the fundamental one being a "contrast of writing center instruction to classroom instruction" (37). To give ourselves a distinctive identity, we oppose ourselves to something with which everyone is familiar: the classroom.

Collaboration between student writers appears in various guises: small groups discuss each writer's paper in turn; a pair of classmates exchange papers to read and critique; a whole class evaluates a few students* papers based on an established set of criteria; a student shares her paper with a peer tutor at a writing center. All of these situations attempt to capture and build on the energy and shared learning that occur when students work together. And yet, while both the writing center and the classroom aim for collaborative learning, each context places the students in a different relationship. In the classroom, the students work together as peers under the teacher's guidance; in the writing center, students must work to overcome the disparity of authority inherent in their given roles of tutor and tutee. The difficulty for writing tutors lies in balancing their more powerful position as tutor with the goals of peer collaboration. Thus, collaboration in writing takes different forms and requires different skills in the contexts of classroom and writing center. This paper will use a study of a high school writing center program to illustrate and explain these differences. We hope that this discussion will provide insight into how writing tutors perceive and cope with their roles in a writing center and how the collaboration that occurs in a writing center affects students as writers and as people. Kenneth Bruffee's definition of collaborative learning provides a framework for understanding the difference between classroom and writing center collaboration. In his article, "Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind,1 " Kenneth Bruffee explains that " Collaborative learning provides a social context in which normal discourse occurs: a community of knowledgeable peers" (644). Adapting Thomas Kuhn' s theories about the scientific community, Bruffee emphasizes that a group of people together determine the accepted knowledge, the "normal discourse"

The empowering of writers touches close to interests common to writing centers -no one associated with one-to-one conversation can ignore the benefits of collaboration, the reality and effects of interpretive communities, and the intellectual respect and consideration owed to students by teachers. Yet empowering writers should mean more than simply acknowledging social backgrounds and encouraging self-disclosing discussion and listening (though both activities are of course vital). It should also create opportunities and methods for students to speak powerfully in discourse appropriate to the academy.

When I speak about the move from expressive to academic discourse, I realize I am perpetuating a notion which may interfere with the proper understanding of either of these modes.That is, my statement implies that there's a one-directional movement, that academic discourse is somehow higher up on a hierarchical scale.I do not, in fact, believe that to be the case."Academic Discourse" as it occurs in practice in many undergraduate courses, may be among the least useful, least authentic forms of language use.Required term papers or critical papers often function as tests rather than as explorations.They are performances of certain required skills: use of sources, correct documentation, proper formulation of someone else's ideas.Writers are often actively discouraged from expressing their own points of view, from participating in their own reading, or indeed, from "appearing" in the paper at all.Yet if the expressive mode is truly the matrix from which other forms of discourse evolve as James Britton has claimed, then writers, in order to work successfully in academic modes, must move back and forth on the continuum from one form to the other, keeping the self always at the center.The "will to learn" which Jerome Bruner asserts is an intrinsic motive in all of us, may be stifled when rigid and formal demands prevent students from engaging in more tentative, exploratory prose."What the school imposes," say Bruner, "often fails to enlist the natural energies that sustain spontaneous learning -curiosity, a desire for competence, aspiration to emulate a model, and a deep-sensed commitment to the web of social reciprocity" (127).In the Writing Lab at the University of Iowa we try very hard to engage -or perhaps to rekindle that will to learn in our students.