Talk about Writing

The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors

Jo Mackiewicz, Isabelle Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351272629
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Talk about Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors offers a book-length empirical study of the discourse between experienced tutors and student writers in satisfactory conferences. It analyzes writing center talk, focusing on tutors' verbal strategies, at the macro- and microlevels. The study details tutors' use of three categories of tutoring strategies—instruction, cognitive scaffolding, and motivational scaffolding—with each chapter of the analysis ending in practical advice about tutor training.

The second edition adds to the discussion of research provided in the first edition, maintaining the two previous goals: to provide a theory-based coding scheme for analyzing tutoring strategies according to their potential for instructing and scaffolding student writers' learning, and to demonstrate that analysis on 10 satisfactory conferences conducted by experienced writing center tutors. New to this edition, the authors expand the previous discussion of the coding scheme with additional details about its development. Along with the expanded Chapter 3 about research methods, this edition features new examples from the corpus of conferences and updates the literature review.

1 Talk about Writing

An Introduction to Our Empirical Study

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• Our Goals for Talk about Writing

• TAW and RAD Research

• Our Theoretical Framework and Coding Scheme for Analyzing Tutor Talk

• Two Examples

• An Overview of TAW: Chapters and Contribution

• A Final Thought before We Begin

In the first edition of Talk about Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors (2015), we argued for more empirical research about the language of writing center conferences, and we demonstrated what such data-collecting, systematic analyses might look like in writing centers. Since 2014, when Talk about Writing (TAW) went to press, the number of articles reporting or discussing replicable, aggregable, data-supported (RAD) research (Haswell 2005) has increased. For example, in their 2012 analysis of RAD studies published in The Writing Center Journal from its founding in 1980 until 2009, Driscoll and Perdue found that only 15 studies (16.5 percent of published articles) came close to fulfilling the criteria set out in their RAD Research Rubric. We examined five recent issues of The Writing Center Journal, published from 2014 to 2016 (33.2, 34.1, 34.2, 35.1, 35.2). These five issues yielded 12 articles that appear at a glance to fulfill most of Driscoll and Perdue’s RAD criteria (Block 2016; Dinitz and Harrington 2014; Driscoll 2015; Driscoll and Perdue 2014; Lerner 2014; Rifenburg 2016; Ryan and Kane 2015; Salem 2016; Severino and Shih-Ni Prim 2015; Thompson and Mackiewicz 2014; Wells 2016; Zimmerelli 2015). Two more articles discuss RAD (Nordstrom 2015) and data-supported research (Kjesrud 2015).

Over the past three years, more articles discussing RAD or using RAD methodology have been published in The Writing Center Journal than the number appearing for the 29 years from 1980 until 2009. Although few of these articles are concerned with tutor–student writer talk, we consider this trend toward an increase in empirical research a sign that, at least for the present, writing center researchers will continue to include systematic, replicable, empirical studies on their research agendas. At least, we hope so.

The practical benefit of conducting a RAD study of tutor–student writer language is its application to tutor training. The research reported in TAW informs the concern to develop tutoring strategies that can become theory- and research-driven best practices.

Our Goals for Talk about Writing

In the second edition of TAW, we continue with our two goals for the first edition and add a third goal: (1) to present the analytical research tool that we previously developed, a coding scheme based on theory and practice related to scaffolding, and show how others can use it to examine writing center talk, particularly writing center tutors’ talk; (2) to provide a close, empirical analysis of experienced tutor talk that can facilitate tutor training; and (3) to extend our original discussion of the complexities of coding natural-language data and our process in developing our coding scheme.

Toward accomplishing the first goal, we explain the theory, research, and iterative testing that contributed to the coding scheme that we present. We invite other researchers to use our coding scheme to analyze tutor–student talk in their own writing centers, thereby replicating the analysis with their language data and perhaps adding to or rejecting the findings we present. Although our coding scheme lays bare a most important facet of writing center conferences—the one-to-one talk that tutors use to help student writers learn to improve their writing—we note that no coding scheme can meet the needs of all researchers, who will have different interests and goals and even different views of learning.

Toward accomplishing our second goal, we argue that a close, empirical analysis of experienced tutor talk can facilitate tutor training. What tutors say has been found to make a difference in students’ learning. Take, for example, Chi, VanLehn, and Litman’s (2010) study of tutors’ “microlevel” decisions. They found that microlevel decisions such as asking a student for justification (or not) had a significant impact on students’ learning outcomes. But, more important, they point out that, “the fine-grained interaction (microsteps) of human tutoring are a potential source of pedagogical power, but human tutors may not be particularly skilled at choosing the right microsteps” (233). In other words, tutoring strategies that can make a difference in students’ learning do not necessarily come naturally.

Finally, toward accomplishing the third goal, we have expanded Chapter 3, the methods discussion. There, we explain our process for developing our coding scheme and discuss other ways to go about reliably coding natural-language data. As Smagorinsky (2008) says, the methods section of a research report is its “conceptual epicenter” (390). It must be detailed enough to allow replication. We intend for the methods discussion to provide information beyond that needed to replicate our study, perhaps offering guidance and inspiration for other types of textual analyses.

For the research that composes the majority of TAW (Chapters 4–7), we selected arguably the 10 best writing center conferences from our corpus of 51 conferences. The tutors and student writers who participated in these 10 conferences evaluated them as highly satisfactory (five or six on a six-point scale). Our analysis of these conferences is detailed, examining both macrolevel and microlevel conference features and reporting quantitative and qualitative data. In Chapter 8, we focus on one of the 10 tutors (T9). We examine four of her conferences: one is a first-time meeting with a student writer, a conference that we also examine in Chapters 4–7. To that conference, we add three more: one, a writing center conference with a repeat student writer, and two with a student writer whom T9 tutored as a writing fellow in a writing-in-the-disciplines (WID) program. Comparing T9’s talk in these four conferences allowed us to consider effects of tutoring familiar versus unfamiliar student writers and tutoring as a writing center tutor versus as a writing fellow embedded in a particular class.

We acknowledge that some might question why they should invest time and energy into picking apart and digging into the details of writing center discourse. Indeed, we realize that most who administer writing centers develop an innate sense of the kinds of talk that facilitate satisfactory conferences, a sense that comes from hundreds of hours enveloped in the rhythms of tutoring discourse. In TAW, we try to show how a research-driven framework can help even experienced directors and tutors to systematically analyze tutors’ talk and use that analysis to train new tutors.

TAW and RAD Research

Richard Haswell (2005) has provided an often-quoted definition of RAD research:

RAD scholarship is a best effort inquiry into the actualities of a situation, inquiry that is explicitly enough systemized in sampling, execution, and analysis to be replicated; exactly enough circumscribed to be extended; and factually enough supported to be verified.

(201)

The research reported in TAW fits into one of Haswell’s RAD studies’ categories: “[t]extual analysis with report of application, using a systematic scheme of analysis that others can apply to different texts and directly compare” (208). The textual analysis reported in TAW uses a mixed-methods approach. It employs qualitative techniques in the coding and quantitative techniques in the frequency counts and analysis.

In addition, the coding scheme is “elaborative” (Auerbach and Silverstein 2003, 104; Saldaña 2013, 229); that is, it was originally developed to analyze tutors’ strategies for teaching decoding in an adult literacy program. We borrowed it, tested it on transcribed writing center conferences not used in this study, and revised it recursively, until we were sure the coding scheme could identify and categorize every instance of teaching in our corpus of conferences. Rather than the popular grounded-theory approach where coding categories derive from the data, the elaborated coding scheme was based on learning theories developed by Vygotsky and later by Bruner and his associates, as discussed in Chapter 2. We agree with Nordlof (2014), whose article was published after the first edition of TAW went to press, that a focus on learning as development (or growth in skill and knowledge acquisition) represented in the notion of scaffolding and in the concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) provides a productive lens for describing tutoring strategies in writing center conferences. It has informed our own understanding of effective tutoring for many years. Further, since the 1970s, empirical research and conceptual discussions have validated the Vygotsky– Bruner theoretical framework. Therefore, although our research does not add to theory, it applies an established theoretical framework to an unexplored context.

Within its theoretical focus on learning, TAW reports research that is:

• Replicable. As mentioned previously, we hope that interested researchers use our coding scheme to analyze conferences from their own writing centers and, thereby, attempt to replicate our findings. The differences in location, or even the addition of participants unlike the ones in our study (for example, L2 American English writers), should not prevent replication. (See Driscoll and Perdue 2014.)

• Aggregable. When research is replicated, findings can be aggregated, or combined, and, with enough replication across differing contexts, aggregated findings become generalizable. A study that is not replicable is not aggregable. Based on the information about methods provided in Chapter 3 and exemplified throughout TAW, we believe our research fits both the replicable and aggregable criteria.

• Data-supported. As will be shown in Chapters 4–8, our transcribed conferences provide plentiful data. In addition, based on what we have observed in The Writing Center Journal and other writing center publications, the conferences described in TAW share similarities with conferences from other writing centers.

Our Theoretical Framework and Coding Scheme for Analyzing Tutor Talk

Our coding scheme examines writing center conferences at the macro- and microlevels. As mentioned previously, the elaborative scheme was derived from research about scaffolding, led by Wood, Bruner, and Ross’s 1976 study (where the term “scaffolding” originated), and from research about Vygotsky’s ZPD (1978, 1987). This groundbreaking research portrays learning as developing from a collaborative, context-dependent relationship between a student (a less expert member of a community) and a teacher or tutor (a more expert member of a community). The process of teaching begins with what the student currently knows or can do and moves forward toward mastery of a new task, the tutor’s support decreasing until the student can perform the task independently. Adapted to writing center conferencing, this cultural psychological theory of learning requires the following:

• Tutors are more knowledgeable about writing than student writers.

• Tutors understand how people learn, particularly in terms of writing performance.

• Tutors know how to work collaboratively with student writers by building rapport and trust, and they encourage student writers’ active participation in conferences.

• Tutors know how to diagnose what a student writer currently knows and how to determine when a student writer is floundering.

• Tutors know how to help s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Talk about Writing: An Introduction to Our Empirical Study
• 2 Literature Review
• 3 Methods
• 4 The Three Conference Stages and Tutoring Strategies: The Overall Results
• 5 Instruction Strategies
• 6 Cognitive Scaffolding Strategies
• 7 Motivational Scaffolding Strategies
• 8 Case Study: A Writing Center Tutor Becomes a Writing Fellow
• 9 Talk about Writing: A Conclusion to Our Empirical Study
• Appendix
• References
• Index