Dominance and Peer Tutoring Sessions with English Language Learners.

In order to better understand the complex dynamic that often occurs during writing center sessions between native English speaking (L1) tutors and English language learners (ELL), this study investigates linguistic dominance through time-at-talk, turn-taking, agendasetting, and content analysis. We conclude that, in keeping with theory and practice of tutor training in inquiry-based pedagogy, ELL students and peer tutors vacillate between the linguistic dominant position, indicating that participants establish a collaborative and egalitarian environment. However, L1 tutors may experience dissonance because the agenda set by ELL students often focuses on surface features such as grammar and diction rather than on global revisions. The Writing Center peer tutor reads a paper just presented to her, while the engineering student, whose first language is Mandarin Chinese, shifts uneasily in his seat across the small table. He nervously glances at the clock hanging on the cinder-block wall. An awkward silence hangs between them, and the anxiety becomes even more palpable as the tutor hesitantly offers a suggestion: I think that’s fairly straightforward, but you might want to, see I don’t know. Mmmm, where is that part? I don’t know if in something like this you’re supposed to have a hypothesis that you state up front. I don’t really know, but it might be helpful to say that this is your working hypothesis. This is what you think is gonna happen but you acknowledge that possibly it could be that. So, maybe make that more explicit that this is what you’re thinking will happen and that you recognize that this is possible. In this one simple example, the peer consultant reveals her uncertainty with For further information contact: Diana Calhoun Bell | University of Alabama in Huntsville | 136 Madison Hall | Huntsville, AL 35899 | belldc@uah.edu 1 | TLAR, Volume 13, Number 1 hedges like “might,” “maybe,” and “I don’t know,” a total of six times in six sentences. This typical short utterance illustrates the discomfort that often occurs in writing center sessions between consultants who are speakers of English as a first language, what we will designate as L1 speakers, and student clients who are non-native speakers learning English as a second --or tertiary--language. In the above example, the consultant responds to global issues, but in doing so uses linguistic hedges, perhaps because of her discomfort in dominating the focus of the session. Although she responds to global issues in the student’s writing as she has been trained to do, he wants her to specifically address his grammar usage. His agenda for the session is different from hers, resulting in a clash of cultural preferences that complicates the communication process for both parties. It comes as no surprise that, like the tutor excerpted above, writing tutors often feel apprehensive about giving direct advice for a student paper, especially when the students with whom they work depend on them as an authority figure, a rhetorical position that peer tutors try to minimize in order to create a more egalitarian space for collaboration within the tutoring session. It is common practice to train tutors using the inquirybased method, a strategy wherein the more experienced peer tutor asks relevant and probing questions that lead students to establish a topic, refocus their ideas, reorganize their evidence, rethink their claims, or make other changes to their work. The key is that the tutor, rather than directing specific changes, merely engages students in thought processes that help them work through their rhetorical decisions. Writing tutors are trained to facilitate rather than control the revision process and to help students with the process of writing rather than direct specific surface-level changes. However, English language learners are often, understandably, preoccupied with correcting surface features of writing such as grammar and diction. To further complicate matters, ELL students often come to the writing center with a heightened view of the tutor as an authority figure because international models of education usually emphasize the authority of teachers and tutors (Powers, 1993a, 1993b; Wiegle & Nelson, 2004; Bell & Youmans, 2006). In “Rethinking Writing Center Conferencing Strategies for the ESL Writer” (1993b), Judith Powers asserts that “collaborative techniques depend so heavily on shared assumptions or patterns, conferences that attempt to merely take the techniques we use with L1 writers and apply them to ELL writers may fail to assist writers we intend to help” (p. 93). This assertion underpins this research project, hinting at the reason for the tutor’s uncertainty in ELL consultations and highlighting potential imbalances and concerns with the practice of collaboration within ELL sessions. When tutors rely on the patterns they establish when working with L1 writers, superimposing similar strategies in sessions with English language learners, they often recognize that the collaboration is somehow out of sync, but they don’t have the necessary techniques to get back on track. S. North (1984) asserts that while writing center assistance is collaborative, it is also student-centered, and consultants must “begin from where the student is, and move where the student moves” (p. 439). Students who comprise the average writing center clientele bring varied majors and academic backgrounds to each tutoring session, and research