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

Writing centers provide a crucial site for multilingual writers to experience generative and productive conversation about their writing projects and for their language and cultural experiences to be appreciated as sources for meaning-making. For this to be possible, tutors must understand the phenomenon and problems of standard language ideology (SLI) and should have opportunities to develop practices that reflect translingual perspectives on language and communication. This study examines peer tutors’ participation on a private staff blog to demonstrate how opportunities to reflect on translingual practices and experiences can shift tutors’ knowledge and attitudes about SLI and create conditions for more equitable, cosmopolitan experiences for multilingual writers.

A common practice in writing centers is to record the events of a tutoring session after it has occurred. Commonly written by tutors, “session notes” can be a useful resource for the day-to-day support work in which tutors engage. Currently, however, little research exists on how session notes can be used to measure tutor development and change over time. Instead, research focuses predominantly how particular audiences interact with session notes, rather than the linguistic content therein. This study addresses the gap in research between the conceptual and practical uses of session notes. The researchers implemented semesterly training modules for tutors, and then conducted a longitudinal discourse analysis of 1,261 session notes that were collected over six semesters. Session notes were coded for 12 variables to include behavioral, semantic, and affective reflections on writing center work. From this analysis, we were able to conceptualize how, in completing these forms, tutors describe their tutoring practice and demonstrate their tutoring knowledge. Findings show that, for many aspects of note taking, a semester of experience has an effect on tutors, such that they start to conform on note taking practices; however, specific trainings can change the behavior of experienced tutors.

While resilience often defines writing center survival strategies, resistance offers a familiar stance in relation to dominant classroom and institutional practices. However, both resilience and resistance are indexed to a perceived “normal,” and violations of normativity have consequences not always imagined in individual tutoring sessions or theoretical discussions.

Though enrollment of learning-disability (LD) students is on the rise in higher education, instructors are often underprepared to effectively support them. The composition pedagogy community needs more discussion of strategies to help LD students in the writing classroom. Scholarship on writing tutoring suggests that one such strategy is to exhibit active and intentional empathy. Tutoring pedagogy has long advocated approaching students with compassion through strategies such as empathic listening and interrogative, coparticipatory dialogue. To best serve all of our students, particularly those with learning disabilities or attention deficit disorders or who are on the autism spectrum, composition instructors should look to tutoring pedagogy’s model of a nonhierarchical, interrogatory, listening-based approach to working with students. These strategies begin with empathy for our students.

In the University of Minnesota’s Student Writing Support program, we gather, record, and share student and course information in order to support consultants in their work with writers; to assess and improve our own practice; and to make compelling, data-driven arguments for the center’s continued existence. Recognizing moments when these data-collection practices worked against the relationships we wanted to build with student writers, we began to critique these practices, with the goal of creating more intentional criteria and methods for soliciting client information. In Fall 2013, we developed and introduced an online Student Profile tool where clients could indicate their preferred name, provide a guide to pronouncing their name, include their gender pronouns, list any language(s) they speak and/or write, and indicate anything else they would like our consultants to know about them as writers/learners. We have become particularly interested in what students choose to share about themselves in that last open-ended prompt: When we give students opportunities to disclose aspects of their identity, what do we learn about them and about how they construct their identities in the context of a writing consultation? In this article we share our analysis of client data we collected in 2016–17, which reveals students’ awareness of their identities as writers, students, and learners as well as the complexities of these identities in a writing center context. Our findings also speak to larger conversations about the ways student identities are constructed and created within higher education.

Abstract Why do conversations regarding students’ right to their own language and antiracism in the writing center still invite insults and agitation? After all, these struggles for students’ rights to self-determination and their own language in composition are far from new. The narratives present within this writing move beyond mere analysis of how and why established institutions attempt to control, and, rather, put Laura Micciche’s theories of emotion and performance to the test. When teaching tutor training, readings regarding students' right to their own language and race potentially cause conflict and can, at least at first, elicit strong emotional responses. This article explores the value of such early emotional reactions to these readings. Can the tutors’ emotional performances, both in action and voice, eventually help to bring attention to, or subvert the backlash and attacks antiracism rhetoric tends to invite? Within its pages, Micciche’s Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching suggests that we perform emotional appeals rather than simply make them. Through performance, she claims, we present emotion, not as something that resides in people to be shared or withheld, but as encounters between people. This article’s narrative “reenactments,” then, are set to reveal the fears and desires behind the resistance I’ve both witnessed and encountered all while promoting what I deem to be a necessity for emotional performance in antiracism and writing center work.

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.

The forces of globalization and the development of English as a lingua franca have made many scholars and practitioners highlight the urgent need for foreign language literacy. The Norman M. Eberly Multilingual Writing Center (MWC) at Dickinson College addresses that need by offering peer writing tutoring in eleven languages. This profile explains the development of the MWC, the rationale and benefits of the model, the collaborative governance structure that undergirds it, and the redefined pedagogical goals of tutor training.

Within the Learning Development community there are few professional development opportunities or resources for new entrants to the profession, particularly with regard to conducting individual academic writing tutorials. The current study seeks to address this by analysing the talk of individual academic writing tutorials in order to better understand how tutorials are organised and conducted, how identities and relationships are established and how learning is developed. We analysed the audio recordings of one-to-one academic writing tutorials and used conversation analysis methodology to identify features of effective practice. The analysis revealed an overarching three-part sequential structure to the tutorials and identified several features of effective practice in the middle phase where advice-giving occurs. The key finding was that indirect and complex processes of highlighting problems and arriving at solutions are useful to develop learners’ skills and autonomy. The application of these insights has the potential to contribute to a more evidence-informed reflective community of Learning Development practitioners.

Writing center research has explored writing center professionals’ perceptions of tutorial success and satisfaction through a variety of means, yet writers’ perspectives have rarely been investigated. This IRB-approved study has been designed to seek insight into students’ prior knowledge (Bransford, Brown, Cocking, 2000) of the writing center’s goals and functions by analyzing pre-tutorial questionnaires and conducting semi-structured post-tutorial interviews. An interview with an experienced tutor was also conducted for comparison of perceptions. This study begins to investigate students’ prior knowledge about the writing center’s goals and practices that they bring to their tutorial sessions. Secondarily, I was interested in where students derive their perceptions of the writing center’s goals and purpose. The research revealed that most students do not have a clear idea of what the writing center’s purpose is or how the sessions will go. Even though the students knew that they would receive help with their work, they did not know how this would be achieved. Most students indicated that when they arrived, they were interested in creating “better” texts and that they had been directed to the writing center by an authoritative figure, such as an instructor or advisor. Keywords : Undergraduate students, perceptions, peer tutoring, writing, writing center

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.

This article examines the role of emotions in writing center consultations, specifically the use of Carl Rogers’ (1951) empathic listening and responding strategies as a way to acknowledge and engage students’ emotions during writing support. Using survey research and analysis of observations, the training consultants in Rogerian strategies was determined to be an effective approach. Key words : Rogers, empathic listening, empathic responding, empathy, survey research, observation, training Even with data about emotional impacts in college, such as the 2016 annual report from The Center for Collegiate Mental Health (Pennsylvania State University) listing anxiety as the most commonly reported issue (61%), there is a tendency in higher education to downplay emotions and the correlations of attending (or not) to affective dimensions and student success (Beard, Clegg, & Smith, 2007; Morin-Major et al., 2016). This emphasis on the cognitive aspects of writing can make higher education seem like an “emotion-free zone” (Mortiboys, 2011), but this is not always in students’ best interests. Since writing centers are embedded in the larger institutional culture, the emphasis on cognitive concerns impacts our work. Writing center scholarship has examples of addressing emotive concerns and includes discussions about therapeutic approaches. In tutor training manuals, many of the suggestions regarding working with emotional students set up a cautious position for the tutor (Lape, 2008). For many years, our scholarship has leaned toward cognitive discussions (Agostinelli, Poch, Santoro, 2000), and even recent reviews of writing center literature still reveal a concentration on cognitive skills and the negative impact of emotions (Lawson, 2015). Seeing students as emotional beings, acknowledging that academia cannot be an “emotion-free zone,” is important. The question for writing centers is to what extent should we address the affective elements inherent in writing center work. Certainly, consultants are not counselors. If they attempt to act as such, they make themselves and the students with which they interact vulnerable in ways that may not be healthy. Additionally, writing centers cannot provide the tools, training, and certifications to prepare peer-writing consultants to address all the emotional needs of all students. But there are still tools within psychology that can be used to acknowledge the cognitive and emotive elements of students in writing centers in ways that are supportive of them as people first and writers second. In this article, we explore the ways in which addressing emotions in writing center work has been discussed and then look specifically at how using Carl Rogers’ (1951) empathic listening and responding approach can support the inclusion of emotions in writing consultations as a way to lead into our study examining and applying empathic listening at our writing center.

Introduction: Faculty members have little time and usually lack expertise to provide writing feedback on lab reports. Sending students to a writing center, an existing resource on virtually all college campuses, could fill that gap. However, the majority of peer writing tutors are in nontechnical majors, and little research exists on training them to provide support for engineering students. Research question: Can peer writing tutors without technical backgrounds be trained to provide effective feedback to engineering students? About the case: Previously, sending students to the writing center was ineffective. The students did not see the value, and the tutors did not feel capable of providing feedback to them. To remedy this situation, an interdisciplinary training method was developed collaboratively by an engineering professor and the writing center director. Situating the case: Researchers have suggested that effective writing center help for engineering students is possible, and the authors have designed an interdisciplinary training method that has produced positive results. Supporting literature includes the use of generalist tutors, writing in the disciplines, genre theory, and knowledge transfer. Methods/approach: This was a three-year experiential project conducted in a junior-level engineering course. The assignment, a lab report, remained the same. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from students and tutors. Results/discussion: Tutor feedback and student satisfaction significantly improved. However, a few students who were satisfied overall still expressed interest in having their reports reviewed by a tutor with a technical background. Conclusions: Interdisciplinary tutor training can improve the feedback of peer writing tutors, providing support for faculty efforts to improve student writing. The method requires minimal faculty time and capitalizes on existing resources.

This meta-analysis of writing center scholarship surveys the last twenty years of empirical work from The Writing Center Journal, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. Writing centers are traditionally predicated on treating writers as both beneficiaries of tutoring and active collaborators in its success. Our pedagogy is tutee-centered in its practice and the benefits it produces, and although we pride ourselves in acting as team players in tutoring sessions, does the same quality emerge in existing research? This paper finds writing center scholarship is rife with studies where the writer-as-beneficiary takes precedence over the often-absent writer-as-collaborator. Put another way, we often attend to writers as recipients of tutoring, but we rarely address their perspectives as active participants in testing our pedagogical assumptions. This paper demonstrates historical trends in scholarship and recent moves to center writers in rigorous, participatory roles in evidence-based inquiry. By engaging with tendencies in data collection in writing center research, this project addresses an unconsidered gap between existing principles and the role of tutees in our evolving research practices. This project offers a custom taxonomy for tutee-based studies, and a thematically organized table of findings.

When writing center administrators (WCAs) consider educating tutors, they do so with a range of perspectives in mind. Tutors need to first be confident in both their tutoring and writing abilities. However, new tutors must also be able to put themselves in the perspective of a struggling student writer who they may work with in a tutoring session. In this article, we conceptualize this issue dealing with self-efficacy or “people’s beliefs in their abilities to produce given attainments” (Bandura 307). Research has begun to explore this topic (Nowacek and Hughes), but has not specifically called this “self-efficacy.” Composition research has a long history of examining self-efficacy, but little research has explored tutors’ self-efficacy. This research has not examined the relationship between tutoring and writing self-efficacies, nor has previously research considered how tutoring experience may impact self-efficacy. To extend this conversation, we developed and administered a survey to writing center tutors across the US to answer the following research questions: What are tutors’ writing and tutoring self-efficacies? Do tutors’ writing and tutoring self-efficacies correlate? Do experienced tutors have different writing and tutoring self-efficacies than new tutors? Results indicated that tutors had high writing and tutoring self-efficacies (mean scores were from 80-100), but the range varied pretty significantly (ranges for writing were 40-100 and ranges for tutoring were 49-100). Writing and tutoring self-efficacy scores were strongly correlated (r=.815 and p =.001). Finally, tutoring self-efficacy and tutoring experience were weakly correlated (r=.186 and p =.025). These results suggest that tutoring and writing self-efficacies inform one another and that tutors have different experiences with developing self-efficacy with their tutoring and writing, which suggests that tutoring and writing self-efficacy is very individualized.

If the two of you are sitting there together, your reading silently squanders the interaction time on something that is very one-sided. If you respond to the text as a reader, as you proceed, the writer can get a better sense of what happens for a reader as the text unfolds. When you read aloud, the student can hear how the writing will sound to someone else (1-2). --William J. Macauley,“Paying Attention to Learning Styles in Writing Center Epistemology, Tutor Training, and Writing Tutorials.” [W]hile tutors had been trained to consider and discuss the intersections among audience, genre, and discipline with their students, their working understanding of the role of audience in this relationship seemed to operate on a global level with only fleeting or intuitive (and therefore inaccessible) considerations at the local level. Thus, while tutors had a conceptual understanding of readerly dynamics. . . they had less practice articulating the impact that discrete elements of a text have on a reader (14). --Amanda M. Greenwell, “Rhetorical Reading Guides, Readerly Experiences, and WID in the Writing Center.”

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

Abstract Because of the author’s experience hearing from other writing center professionals at community colleges that community college students are not capable of serving as peer tutors, as well as survey data demonstrating that community colleges do not hire peer tutors at the same rate as other institutions of higher learning, the author conducted exit interviews of peer tutors at Salt Lake Community College in order to determine what peer tutors learn from their work experiences in a community college writing center. The purpose of the study was to establish what peer tutors learn, in order to correlate not simply what they take away from their experience, but also to substantiate that peer tutors can indeed help the writers they work with to learn. Since the results of this analysis were broad and represented a wide variety of concepts that are learned by peer tutors, the author designed a more specific survey to explore what they learned about writing and being a writer. The resulting data lead the author to conclude that peer tutors learn much from their work experience, allaying concerns that community college students are not capable of serving as peer tutors.

Abstract This longitudinal mixed-methods study assesses students’ perceptions of the writing center at a large (approximately 11,325 students) multi‑campus two‑year college. The survey was collaboratively designed, with faculty and student participation; it presents findings from 865 student respondents, collected by peer tutors‑in‑training. The study offers a baseline assessment (Fall 2014) of the writing center, prior to wide-sweeping changes in recruitment, staffing, and training models, as well as a post-assessment (Fall 2015) analysis of the changes in student knowledge of the WC and its purpose. It also offers data on the trajectory of student development in relation to number of sessions attended. In 2014, students’ experiences at the writing center were inconsistent; the poorly articulated mission of the WC adversely affected students’ knowledge scores, and the center’s reliance on editorial-like feedback, given predominately by adjunct faculty, contributed to inconsistent reportage in perceived learning by attended sessions. Many of these trends, however, reversed in 2015. This paper seeks to demonstrate the important role that RAD research can play in evaluating student learning within writing center contexts and articulating how and at what moments, and under what conditions, learning and development occurs in the student-writing center relationship. It also offers a replicable experimental method that researchers at other institutions can adapt and apply to their own institutional contexts and programmatic needs.

Abstract After a decade of working in writing centers as a tutor and administrator, I have experienced and witnessed many challenging consultations. A particularly vexing type of consultation occurs when tutors work with advanced students writing in unfamiliar disciplines and genres. In this article, I consider whether the reading method employed during such consultations supports or detracts from tutors’ efforts to offer helpful advice. Specifically, I ask: When and how should writing tutors read students’ drafts to best support and engage them? How do the specific needs of student writers factor into selecting the best reading method? To respond to these questions, I first describe the results of a review of 70 well-known universities’ writing center websites, which reveals that the majority of centers require tutors to read students’ writing for the first time during consultations. Next, I posit some limitations of during-consultation reading models and argue that the read-ahead model may better meet the needs of some student-writer populations. To provide a framework for the read-ahead model, I illustrate strategies that may be implemented to prepare tutors for consultations, drawing on research-based techniques that a more-senior director and I used at a private doctoral-granting university as we established the first writing center on the campus. I conclude by suggesting that directors consider the read-ahead method as yet another tool in their vast arsenal of pedagogical techniques, particularly when tutors must work with advanced writers from unfamiliar disciplines.

Across the country, colleges and universities are reporting an increased enrollment of students on the autism spectrum. This is in part thanks to increased efforts in early detection during childhood, where students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are then enrolled in services outside and within public schools to help integrate them into mainstream classrooms. Yet such integrative services, by and large, fall short in higher education, and many students find themselves without the support they once received in their primary school years. Writing demands are indeed challenging for many—without securing basic college-level composition skills, the likelihood of student success is placed in jeopardy. Writing centers can be regarded as gatekeepers for autistic students, since their assistance can greatly impact student success. Yet problems remain with access and inclusion based on rhetorical situations, as well as a lack of tutor education. This paper provides suggestions based on April Mann’s methods of inclusion for writing center tutees with ASD, including spatial awareness and tutor education. I also outline other possible methods, including outreach to students with ASD to prevent further isolation among the university population.

The Burkean parlor has been integrated into the lore of writing centers, showcasing how writing centers have both conversational and collaborative elements. However, the ease for students to enter into the academic conversation is not as simple as this metaphor suggests. To rethink this concept, kairos, or the opportune moment, must be considered. This article will investigate kairos as spatial and how that conceptualization can deepen the Burkean parlor and the conversations within it. Breaking down the Burkean parlor into three stages—questions, metacognition, and choices—can benefit the practicality of the tutoring session. Kairos complicates each of these three points of the student writer’s integration into the conversation. The creation of kairos depends upon the student and tutor being mindful of these conscious and unconscious interactions and understanding how to most effectively disrupt the spatial boundaries of the tutoring session. Connecting kairos into the Burkean parlor metaphor differentiates the perspective of the tutoring session, encouraging both student and tutor to become more aware of the spatiality of tutoring and to redefine these boundaries.

^^^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 provides insight into the role of students’ writing motivation in a writing centre setting. Based on my personal experiences as a peer tutor at a writing centre, the article highlights the importance of the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) for the evaluation of students’ motivational levels. It thus shows that the distinction between the motivational concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as well as between ‘amotivation’ vs. ‘demotivation’ provides a basis for tutors and instructors who endeavour to foster students’ motivation. Furthermore, the evaluation of different motivational strategies indicates that both peer tutors and instructors can make a valuable contribution to the development of students’ writing motivation by giving informative feedback, setting clear goals, creating relaxed atmosphere and enhancing students’ positive image as writers.

Case-based assignments represent a common form of assessment on academic business programmes (Easton 1982 and Mauffette-Leenders, Erskine and Leenders 1997), with students required to generate amongst other responses, business case reports, case critiques and case analyses (Nathan 2013). Only limited research is available to support academic writing tutors in understanding such case response texts with published studies focusing solely on business case reports (Freedman and Adam 1994, Forman and Rymer 1999a, 1999b and Nathan 2013). In order to aid writing tutors in supporting academic business students, this paper presents a small corpus study of 36 case response non-report texts (ca. 40000 words), generated on a UK MBA programme. These texts represent categories designated case critique, case advisory and case comparison texts, and were written in three business specialisms, Marketing, Human Resource Management, and Finance, respectively. Rhetorical analysis identified variable rhetorical structure dependent on text category, although orientation, analytical and conclusion components were present at high frequency in all text categories. Substantial variability in citation frequencies, modal verb, business lexis, and first person pronoun deployment was also identified between text categories. Awareness of both similarities and differences in case-based writing responses should serve as a useful aid in informing academic writing pedagogy.

Two long-standing assumptions on which writing centers operate are that individual tutoring helps students’ writing development and that the actual talk of such tutoring enables such development (Bruffee, 1984; Lunsford, 1991; Gillespie & Lerner, 2008; Mackiewicz & Thompson, 2015). Questions, long thought of as one of the most important pedagogical tools, enable writing tutors to tap into students’ knowledge of writing, help them clarify the writing task, advance their thoughts, and advise them indirectly on how to proceed further. Whereas writing center lore has emphasized the importance of questioning in non-directive tutorials, scholars have only recently begun to explore empirically tutors’ actual use of questions more generally in tutorials, the differentiated functions of questions, and the strategic use of questions in tutorial discourse (Thompson & Mackiewicz, 2014).In this study we present an original, empirical scheme for coding question types in writing tutorials derived from 15 writing tutorial sessions in our own corpus of the genre. We apply this functionally oriented scheme to one typical session to show how questions operate locally, how they are distributed across a session, as well as how they achieve both pedagogical and organizational goals within such interactions. The use of questions in this tutorial is compared with question use in 14 other sessions to discover patterns in tutors’ questioning behavior. Our findings provide insight into how tutors’ strategic use of particular question types can empower students to become more active participants in the tutorial.

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

Peer tutoring non-native writers seems to pose particular challenges to tutors with regard to the overall goals and principles of peer tutoring that have been expressed in the literature. Principles such as non-directivity and long-term emphasis on the process quality of writing are often assumed to be in conflict with non-native writers’ desire to be actively and directly guided in their process of learning to write in a foreign language. Peer tutoring’s appropriateness therefore remains rather controversial within this particular context. In this article we outline the results of an empirical study focusing on the potential, as well as the limitations, of peer tutoring with regard to non-native writers in a German writing center. Using the method of qualitative content analysis designed to achieve a healthy balance between deductive and inductive aspects of empirical research, we ask the open question: ‘How do peer tutors deal with non-native writers?’ Results show that the limitations of rigid peer tutoring principles become obvious more quickly with non-native writers. However, peer tutoring with non-native writers reveals larger potential, too, and can offer recommendations for peer tutoring in general.

Students often struggle with writing as they are unaware of the process of writing and of strategies and skills to help them write well. They often focus on the product of writing rather than engaging with the process of writing. However, it is in the process of writing, and in the discovery of that process, that learning happens (Murray 1973, Emig 1977, Berlin 1982). It is thought that the inductive, non-intrusive model of peer-tutoring practiced at the Regional Writing Centre at the University of Limerick, based on the model proposed by Ryan and Zimmerelli (2006), encourages students to engage with their own writing and learning in a non-threatening, approachable and positive manner. However, amidst the rising debate on what constitutes student engagement with learning, it is timely to investigate whether, and to what extent, the model used to train peer tutors in the Regional Writing Centre constitutes real and meaningful student engagement for those who peer tutor in the Centre and for the students they tutor.