Source-based writing skills, which include evaluating, synthesizing, and citing sources, are skills that students are expected to acquire as part of college-level writing. Unfortunately, many multilingual writers (MLWs), especially those in advanced degree programs, lack programmatic support and instruction. Thus, writing centers represent a critical site to offer MLWs tutorial-based support. Our study examined whether or not writing centers can help MLWs develop—and transfer—source-based writing skills in a sequence of three tutorials. We recruited five advanced student MLW participants from different cultural backgrounds who were uncomfortable with source use. Through pre-and postwriting samples, interviews, writing process recording videos, and a long-term follow-up, our findings indicate that our three-sequence tutorial significantly improved advanced MLWs’ source-based writing skills and transferred to the next semester. Improvements occurred in the areas of selecting, organizing, and connecting sources as well as in engaging in appropriate source use and avoiding plagiarism, although some areas showed stronger gains than others. This study contributes to the field’s development of replicable, aggregable, and data-supported best practices to explore the efficacy of tutoring for specific populations. We offer suggestions for writing centers to develop, test, and create tutoring-based MLW support programs.

This article explores hospitality as a theoretical framework for valuing emotional engagement and rhetorical listening in writing center consultations, challenging traditional views that prioritize rationality and detachment. Anchored in a university writing center, the study investigates how writing tutors engage with writers, adopting hospitality as a core principle. Semi-structured postconsultation interviews and a focus group allowed tutors to reflect collaboratively on their application of the hospitality framework. Thematic analysis with in vivo coding ensured participants’ voices remained central to the findings. By examining the lived experiences of tutors, the study highlights the dynamic relationship between emotional and rational responses in hospitable tutoring. The results demonstrate the transformative potential of hospitality-based pedagogy in fostering healthier writing relationships, improving writer retention, and enhancing tutors’ academic and emotional skills. The article advocates for the criticality of emotional validation and rhetorical listening as central tenets of effective and hospitable tutoring.

While one-to- one writing tutoring is often viewed as a supportive space for student writers, it can also reproduce racialized linguistic hierarchies that exacerbate anxiety for multilingual students. This article examines second language (L2) anxiety as a structurally induced emotional response to native-speakerism— the ideology that privileges white, Anglophone, native English speakers as the standard for language competence. Drawing from L2 anxiety research in applied linguistics and writing center studies, the article explores how native-speakerism influences multilingual students’ self-perception, interaction, and performance in L2 during one-to- one tutoring. It discusses the sources and dimensions of L2 anxiety across all four language domains—speaking, listening, reading, and writing—and argues that this anxiety persists even at advanced proficiency levels due to internalized linguistic deficit ideologies. By reframing L2 anxiety as a structural equity issue, the article calls for a more justice-oriented tutoring ecology and offers concrete pedagogical strategies and recommendations to help writing tutors recognize and respond to the often-invisible emotional labor multilingual students carry.

For English as an Additional Language (EAL) students, generative AI (GenAI) offers meaningful support for writing in English, while also introducing a new set of challenges. Supporting EAL students in developing AI literacy is crucial to their growth as confident, adaptable writers, and writing center tutors are uniquely positioned to facilitate this development. This case study explores the experiences of undergraduate Brazilian international students at a small liberal arts college who received writing feedback from both peer writing center tutors and ChatGPT. Findings indicate that students valued the human connection, contextual understanding, and rhetorical support offered by peer tutors, while turning to ChatGPT for immediate, nonjudgmental assistance, particularly in navigating multilingual challenges. The study offers insight into how peer writing tutors can thoughtfully leverage GenAI to support multilingual writers.

This study analyzes the experiences of undergraduate peer-tutors in a heritage language writing center (HLWC) located at a large public university in the United States. As former heritage language (HL) students themselves, tutors have to navigate the complexities of being bilingual advocates for their tutees while promoting the linguistic ideals of the academic community, where literacy expectations can be more rigid. In order to delve into their experiences at the center, this qualitative investigation examines the end-of- term reflections of 19 Spanish HL tutors working at a Spanish HLWC, addressing the following questions: (1) How do tutors perceive their role as language advocates and arbiters? (2) How can these beliefs be supported or addressed by the HL program? Ideal tutors occupy a middle ground between being a peer-student and an expert-student, whose role is to scaffold the mentee’s process. However, we find that HL tutors struggle with competing linguistic expectations between the heritage and the academic community. Finally, we discuss three areas of tension that are important to address in HL tutor training and program design: ambivalent notions about students’ proficiency and preparedness, their role in the instructional team, and their relationship to expertise.

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.

This study sought to determine the impact writing center consultations have on student writing self-efficacy and to illuminate effective consultant strategies for fostering student writing confidence. As part of a multimethods study, a survey was administered for students to reflect upon and to assess their feelings of writing self-efficacy by describing experiences in writing center consultations. Selected respondents were asked to elaborate on the strategies used by their peer consultant(s) in an optional open-ended interview. Findings suggest that writing center consultations help increase writing self-efficacy. The effective consultant strategies described by study participants are synthesized into an overarching consultant framework of empathy-based tutoring, which includes four key consultant moves that work to foster writing self-efficacy: listening, translating, advising, and motivating. Results from this study have implications for further consultant training and/or professional development programs and reaffirm the value writing centers bring to student writing growth.

Many higher education institutions offer drop-in tutoring programs hosted by writing specialists to support struggling students while others may also/alternatively embed tutors directly into courses. In this quasi-experimental study, we compared survey results from 100 students in basic/developmental courses that featured embedded peer tutors with 78 students who experienced tutoring via a walk-in writing center. Variables explored included writing efficacy and course/tutor perception survey items. While students generally found both embedded and walk-in tutoring to be helpful, the ratings for embedding tutoring tended to be statistically stronger for most variables we investigated, suggesting that students responded more positively to embedded tutoring.

Language expresses our values and identities, but in educational spaces, multidialectical and multilingual students’ voices are often silenced in favor of Standard English (Lockett, 2019). As writing tutors and future language arts educators, we have developed a research-based inclusive grammar curriculum and classroom-based resources to expand the conversation surrounding linguistic inclusion. Guided by the principle that all students should be offered the opportunity to learn the conventions of Standard English, we advocate for inclusive teaching of Standard English grammar in K–12 classrooms and writing centers (Godley et al, 2015). Using previous research on multilingual students, linguistic inclusivity, and dialectical diversity, we created a website for K–12 classroom teachers that provides easily accessible, developmentally appropriate resources to normalize the idea that there is no single way to correctly write or speak English. These resources better prepare K–12 students to utilize writing center services, as both writers and tutors, once they reach higher education. Our lesson plans, worksheets, resource guides, and supplemental materials are designed to provide teachers with resources to have a conversation with students about the power and complexity of language and to anticipate the values of writing center work to support every writer to confidently use their own voice.

This article is adapted from a keynote address at the July 2022 European Writing Centers Association (EWCA) conference, sponsored by the University of Graz in Austria, whose theme focused on writing centers as spaces of empowerment. Designed for peer tutors as well as writing center faculty, this talk first celebrates some examples of writing centers empowering student writers and tutors. It then attempts to articulate what scientific spectacles allow us to see when we look deeper into these examples of empowerment: some of the big ideas, the abstract principles, the constellation of expertise and commitments that underlie our contemporary writing center work. That expertise and those commitments range from what’s familiar in our field (writing expertise, care for writers and tutors, multilingualism, dialogic interaction) to what’s less familiar (the power of interdisciplinary teams and generalists, connectivism). The talk concludes by urging writing centers to use their expertise and commitments to forge partnerships and engage in some activism—in order to empower more writers, make centers and writing more inclusive, and influence teaching and learning at their schools and universities more broadly.

This essay explores writing center theories and collaborative praxis from the perspective of an individual who has experienced long-term isolation and incarceration. This writer reflects on how participation in his college-in- prison community, including his service as a writing tutor and teaching fellow, has led to his immersion in prosocial healing behaviors that come with liberative and collaborative pedagogical processes.

This essay aims to build upon the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project (PWTARP), designed by Bradley Hughes, Paula Gillespie, and Harvey Kail (2010), which focuses on what tutors learn about themselves as writers and students. However, the PWTARP survey, like much of writing center scholarship, focuses on student workers attending PWIs (Predominately White Institutions). To help fill the diversity gap in the existing literature, the current study uses the PWTARP survey as a frame of reference to investigate what tutors learned about themselves as writers and students at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). Based on feedback from a team of current and former tutors, we added questions that addressed demographics, multilingualism, and worker conditions. We conducted a mixed methods case study and collected data via surveys and focus group interviews with tutor alumni before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2022). Our findings connect with many results of the original PWTARP and other responses about economic vulnerability and the emotional labor of tutoring. Also, our survey produced many useful findings about issues related to being a contingent worker, including economic pressures, emotional labor, and professional development.

In this exploratory study, we took as our point of departure Lori Salem’s (2016) call to investigate the factors that affect students’ decisions to visit the writing center. Rather than exploring student decision-making through a sociological lens, as Salem does, we drew on insights from social psychology to understand students’ motivations. We explored two self-theories drawn from social psychology that are associated with students’ academic achievement and with students’ help-seeking: (1) implicit beliefs about intelligence or “mindsets”; and (2) sense of belonging. Using questions from previously validated scales, we measured first-year students’ mindsets and sense of belonging and tested the relationships between these self-theories and students’ visits to the writing center. We found correlations between students’ mindsets and their willingness to seek support, but the relationships differed between minoritized students and comparison students. Although the numbers are modest, we noted a difference in the relationship between sense of belonging and writing center visits for minoritized students. Our study suggests areas for future research, which has the potential to change the way that writing centers conduct outreach to students and has possible implications both for our marketing efforts and tutor training.

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.

In this paper, we explore the complicity of writing centers in the Global North in global neocolonialism despite its resounding rejection within Western writing center scholarship, in which Romeo García contends that writing tutors can be “decolonial agents.” We show that higher education is used by governments in the Global North as a neocolonial tool and situate international U.S. writing center initiatives within this context. Writing centers have remained complicit in global neocolonialism involving the commodification and exportation of American English as well as Western-style institutions, curricula, and pedagogies. This is most explicit in recent writing center initiatives undertaken by the U.S. Department of State in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Central and Southeast Asia. Our analysis of the IWCA and the global community of writing center organizations reveals that few institutions in the field are well positioned to address this important issue. Indeed, the IWCA has remained silent on the complicity of writing centers in the Global North in neocolonialism despite the resounding rejection of neocolonialism within the writing center community.

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 center professionals’ (WCPs) efforts to integrate transfer of learning theory into writing tutor education have exceeded empirical research on the effects of such curricula. Building on research in this area (Cardinal, 2018; Hill, 2016), we designed and implemented a semester-long, transfer-focused training curriculum for experienced undergraduate writing tutors that sought to build on tutors’ prior knowledge of writing center pedagogy. We tracked these tutors’ understanding of, attitudes toward, and uses of transfer and transfer talk in writing center sessions over the course of a semester. Through analysis of training meeting transcripts and a post-training survey, we found that tutors developed a basic understanding of transfer and demonstrated positive attitudes toward transfer and transfer talk; however, they responded negatively to examples of explicit transfer talk in the curriculum and proposed modifications constrained by the social context of tutoring (Carillo, 2020). We characterize these modifications as instances of tutors contextualizing transfer talk in light of their prior knowledge of writing center pedagogy. We encourage WCPs who are designing or researching transfer-focused tutor education to conduct additional empirical research and to prioritize tutors’ perceptions and experiences in order to develop more dynamic conceptions of transfer in writing center studies (Carillo, 2020).

Writing center literature often notes the stress and anxiety of students as a special concern for peer writing tutors, and tutor training manuals offer advice for tutors on how to manage student writers’ anxiety and stress in sessions. Few writing center sources, however, examine the stress/anxiety tutors may experience as a result of their work in the writing center, despite increasing interest in emotions and emotional labor in writing centers. This multi-institutional study examines whether peer writing tutors experience increased stress/anxiety while tutoring. Using a mixed-methods approach combining both surveys and physiological data (salivary cortisol levels controlled against days when they did not tutor), this study investigates the stress/anxiety of 21 tutors across 63 tutoring appointments. The data suggest that peer tutors who enter tutoring sessions in stressed or anxious states are potentially prone to increased stress or anxiety from tutoring. Moreover, they exhibited an inhibited awareness of both student writers’ stress and the potential impact of that stress on tutoring sessions. Results suggest that writing centers should increase their focus on tutor well-being, most crucially on emotional labor and its impacts for peer writing tutors.

Social justice movements, especially Black Lives Matter, inspired many writing center administrators to reflect on their commitments to antiracism and engage with antiracist professional development with their staff. However, there is continued need to study the impact antiracist professional development has on writing center consultants’ ability to practice antiracism in sessions. This article presents a predominantly white institution (PWI) writing center’s attempt to do this work, with a particular emphasis on how antiracist professional development complicates portrayals of consultant agency within the writing center. The study analyzes qualitative data collected from consultants’ reflective writing, survey, and interview responses. Results illustrate that, in the context of enacting antiracism in and beyond the writing center, consultants showed messy, partial, and incomplete forms of agency with the professional development curriculum impacting consultants of color and white consultants differently. These findings suggest writing center studies must embrace an understanding of antiracist professional development that is reflective, fragmented, and iterative, and identify more concrete practices of antiracist consulting.

A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, marks a first for the writing

Writing centers increasingly have been concerned with issues of race and racism in the center. However, most of the conversation around race has centered on student writers, with references to tutors of color given only in passing or in the context of larger discussions on race. This study uses interview data and a grounded theory methodology to examine the experiences of racism and anti-Blackness in writing centers for female Black undergraduate and graduate peer tutors, categorizing the experiences in three ways: attacks on character and identity, denials of credibility, and silencing. Connections are drawn with the experiences the tutors have outside the center, and the argument is made that the racial tension of their centers puts the women in a position of constant negotiation, performing a balancing act in which they must filter their responses to their racist encounters out of self-preservation. The results indicate that writing centers are not yet where the field and practitioners would like them to be and that much of the emotional labor of maintaining a tolerable work environment is falling to tutors of color. Writing center directors must do more to take back this responsibility and change the culture of their centers.

Writing consultants regularly perform emotional labor. They suppress or express emotions to welcome clients and invoke enthusiasm to cultivate writers’ confidence. Because emotional labor performs these crucial functions, it merits focused attention in writing center studies. However, while research has considered the emotional needs that writers bring, scholars have not yet sufficiently examined the affective engagements that consultations require of writing consultants. The first section of this article presents a case for treating affective dimensions of tutoring as labor. The second section analyzes five tutor-training manuals using the Specific Affect Coding System (SPAFF) to identify references to emotion and affect in the texts. This analysis shows that these tutor training manuals offer limited or indirect discussions of emotional labor and neglect the fact that relational work is just as much a practiced skill as cognitive work. The final section offers implications and proposes ways these manuals could start more robust discussions of emotional labor to further writing center goals of creating supportive, collaborative environments. By teaching and valuing the emotional labor of tutors, writing centers can become more inclusive places and mitigate factors that lead to burnout.

Most tutors are trained in a core writing centers belief: Student writers who talk about their writing are student writers who will achieve better learning outcomes. Our comparative study—one of few in writing center research—examined the points in conferences in which student writers talked the most. We examined the very long turns (VLTs) of eight native English speaking (NES) student writers and eight non-native English speaking (NNES) student writers across 16 writing center conferences. We found that NESs contributed more VLTs than NNESs and that more NES conferences contained VLTs. We also found that stating goals for the conference occurred in half of the NES conferences, specifically, in the opening stage, while no NNES conferences had stated opening goals. In the three NNES conferences that contained VLTs, two contained a statement of a sentence-level goal, a description of potential content for the paper, and a period of time spent reading aloud from the paper. Of the VLTs preceded by questions, pumping questions (questions that prod student responses) occurred most frequently. We discuss the role that student-writer motivation and familiarity with the typical conference script played in the results and some implications of this comparative study for tutor training.

This article addresses some of the pitfalls associated with current methods of investigating the transfer of learning within writing centers and encourages the adoption of a dynamic definition of transfer, as well as a dynamic taxonomy of context. The need for a more multidimensional approach to transfer emerged during the course of a preliminary study of a small group of writing center peer tutors over the course of a semester. The study, described in the article, sought to better understand what prior knowledge tutors were drawing on to facilitate tutorials; from which contexts they were transferring this prior knowledge; and how this prior knowledge impacted their work as tutors. The data collected in the form of observations and audio-recorded tutorials, as well as from follow-up interviews with the peer tutors, illustrate the need for writing center studies to develop a more nuanced and comprehensive approach to understanding and studying transfer. By addressing this need, writing center studies can help shape discussions about the transfer of learning.

This article describes a semester-long study that used replicable, aggregable, data-supported (RAD) research methods to investigate embedded tutoring efficacy. The research occurred in three sections of an engineering course, one of which had a course-embedded writing tutor. Over the course of a semester, the researcher investigated changes in students' mindsets, namely their beliefs about the malleability of writing skills. Results suggested students who worked with the embedded tutor improved their mindsets significantly more than did nontutored students. Students in the course-embedded section became more growth-minded, seeing themselves as capable of improving. The researcher also blindly rated samples of students' writing and found tutored students improved their literature-review drafts more significantly than did nontutored students. Tutored students' revised literature reviews were significantly better in terms of organization, style, and mechanics. These findings suggest an embedded tutor can not only improve students' writing performance but also influence their mindsets, demonstrating the important role writing centers can play in promoting the growth mindset.

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.

While writing center scholarship acknowledges tutoring is an emotional endeavor, there has been little attention given to how tutors respond to the stressful facets of their role. In this study, peer writing tutors were surveyed about their engagement in emotional labor and work-related stress in three areas: (a) perceived reasons for emotionally laborious sessions; (b) emotions felt; and (c) strategies employed for emotion regulation and coping with stress. Thematic analysis of responses indicated the perceived reasons included issues in (a) session expectations, (b) tutor-writer dynamics, and (c) emotion regulation. Tutors generally reported more negative emotions than positive ones. However, a majority of tutors reported engaging in adaptive active and internal coping strategies to manage their work-related stressors. A select few tutors reported engaging in maladaptive coping strategies alongside adaptive ones. While results reflect a positive outlook for tutors' abilities to manage their stress, results indicate engagement in emotional labor is a regular task for tutors. Writing centers may benefit from considering stress management as a part of their tutor-training programs to maintain and promote well-being. Practical implications and possible avenues for stress interventions are given.

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

He was professor emeritus of English at Brooklyn College, where he taught for many years and at various times directed the first-year English program, founded and directed the writing center, and directed the Scholars Program and Honors Academy. He is an exemplary figure for writing center and composition scholars because he was instrumental in establishing and conceptualizing peer tutoring in the teaching of writing. Bruffee began experimenting with peer tutoring in the 1970s as a response to the open-admissions policies that almost overnight brought hundreds of underprepared students to City University of New York campuses. Peer tutoring, he discovered, worked surprisingly well in that context. Properly prepared and situated, undergraduate student tutors

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.

Students' misunderstanding of faculty expectations for paraphrase has been empirically demonstrated, and many writing centers conduct workshops to help students adopt better strategies for work with sources. However, little empirical research supports the effectiveness of such efforts. For this study, researchers examined students' attempts to paraphrase before and after a 45-minute workshop presented by an undergraduate peer tutor in several sections of an introductory political science course. Our findings demonstrate that the workshop did help students improve both their understanding of what is expected of them and their attempts to paraphrase. The average score for language increased from 3.11 in the pretest to 3.86 on a 5-point scale in the posttest (n=107, p.001). However, as many students improved at avoiding patchwriting, the quality of their representation of an idea from a source appeared to decline; ideas scores dropped after the workshop from 3.36 to 3.03 (n=107, p.01). The drop

^^^B This article reports the findings of a study on cooperative tutoring, which is a variation of the one-to-one tutoring method. Cooperative ^^^B tutoring, as practiced in this study, consists of two tutors who work ^^^B collaboratively with one student; however, there are other models of ^^^B cooperative tutoring that could be developed. Cooperative tutoring ^^^B described in this article is an adaptation of one method of training new ^^^B tutors, where the novice tutor observes the expert tutor during a tu-^^^B toring session and eventually participates with the expert tutor. Where ^^^B cooperative tutoring differs from this training model is that it involves ^^^B two tutors with a range of tutoring experiences working together with ^^^B one stu(ient. This study focuses specifically on the interactions between ^^^B tutors in cooperative tutoring sessions. I explain the methodology ^^^B used to set up the study and to analyze the data, which is informed by ^^^B grounded theory. I present an interpretation of the data from two of

Working in writing centers is a great gig. We get to lead units committed to making collaborative learning happen in a host of ways: students gaining access to or refining disciplinary literacies, faculty and administration discovering more effective ways for writing to demonstrate learning and transfer, and tutors becoming conscious of their voices as mentors of communities of practice, both disciplinary and sociocultural. Many of us "graduate" from being students who have been tutored in writing centers to serving as writing tutors ourselves; some of us inspired by all of that labor decide to pursue graduate education in and become directors of these amazing units, charged with sustaining and growing these amazing units and all those who teach and learn within While our field has plenty of resources for educating tutors, for coaching faculty across the disciplines on using writing for teaching

This article reports the results of a study of undergraduate research practices and mentoring practices of 107 writing center professionals and 102 undergraduate peer writing tutor researchers. Survey responses from these 209 tutor researchers and professionals provide insight into what they consider to be the benefits of peer writing tutor research and the challenges faced by tutor researchers and their mentors. The article concludes that while both tutor researchers and professionals agree on one significant challenge (time needed to complete projects) and one significant benefit (the positive effects of tutor research on peer tutoring), other benefits and challenges were not consistently identified and discussed by both groups. Implications for tutor research and research mentoring are discussed, and a general call is made for the writing

own right. Fitzgerald argues that we should pursue

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.

e p r o v e d t r u e . D i s c i p l i n a r y e x p e r t i s e d i d r e s u l t in increased tutor directiveness, but this directiveness was used to facilitate rather than hinder effective collaboration.

Writing centers offer support and feedback to student writers who bring in specific concerns about papers and writing. The writing center of our home institution offers walk-in sessions with peer tutors who have taken an extensive preparatory course, which, according to the official course description, helps the tutor to become a “successful reader, listener and responder in peer-tutoring situations.” This training emphasizes our center’s goal of facilitating students’ long-term development as writers. Therefore, tutors in our center are trained to shift the impetus and focus of the session to the writer—over issues just focused on the paper—in order to enhance the writer’s control over his/her own writing processes and writing. The writing center where we were trained and currently work thus emphasizes the model of non-directive, writer-based peer tutoring in which, as Jeff Brooks puts it, tutors “make the student the What a Writer Wants: Assessing Fulfillment of Student Goals in Writing Center Tutoring Sessions

Because writing centers have long been viewed as fix-it shops, mentioning the word "grammar" can spark a heated debate over the writing center's role. Stephen North faulted the English department for perpetuating this misconception. Richard Leahy blamed the writing center's history and "peculiar status" for confusing faculty and students alike (43). Elizabeth Boquet explored tensions caused by shifts between the writing center's identity as both method and space (465). All are valid points, but there is a greater issue affecting both academic writing and the writing center-grammar

since 1987, believes in the power of narrative, the wisdom of peer tutors, and the value of a well-placed hug. He also knows

Ronesineeds, as training literature has yet to address contexts outside North America.Indeed, the few articles that describe writing tutoring outside North America dismiss peer tutoring as inappropriate

Tutors 25 Years Later," links the range and focus of their professional activities to Bruffee's leadership beginning in the late 1970s. One important element of that leadership centers on the growth and development of peer tutoring