TUTORING GUIDELINES AS A DEONTIC RESOURCE AT A WRITING CENTER
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2024
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Abstract
Most institutions maintain institutional guidelines based on specific professional beliefs in order to establish social order within the setting and accomplish their institutional goals (Heritage, 2005; Heritage & Clayman, 2010). Therefore, a key research issue in institutional Conversation Analysis (CA) is to examine how institutional guidelines are "produced, maintained, and transformed through participants' routine interactional work" (Kasper & Wagner, 2014). This topic has been researched in such contexts as psychotherapy (e.g., Parry, 2005; Peräkylä, 1995, 2005; Weiste & Peräkylä, 2013), medical consultations (e.g., Collins, 2005; Lindfors & Raevaara, 2005; Ruusuvuori, 2005), and classrooms (Amir & Musk, 2013; Bonacina-Pugh, 2012; Gynne, 2019; Jakonen, 2016; Rosén & Bagga-Gupta, 2015). Building on this body of research, the current study adopts multimodal CA to investigate how participants comply with, resist, and negotiate institutional guidelines in Writing Center (WC) tutorials.
Based on theories and pedagogical approaches developed in composition studies and writing center scholarship, WCs employ tutoring guidelines that prescribe how tutors should interact with tutees. As reported in previous research, tutors frequently express concerns about deviating from normative tutoring practices (Blau & Hall, 2002; Dixon 2017; Nicklay, 2012). However, previous research has not shown how tutoring guidelines surface in the tutors' observable conduct in their interaction with tutees. Building on Peräkylä and Vehviläinen's (2003) observation that practitioners' theories inform professionals' practices as professional Stocks of Interactional Knowledge (SIKs), this study respecifies WC tutoring guidelines as a deontic resource, that is, as having the capacity to determine participants' actions (Stevanovic, 2011; 2015; 2018; 2021; Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2012; 2014).
The setting for this study is the Hawaiʻi Writing Center (HWC), located at a university in Hawaiʻi. The primary data consist of 39 tutoring sessions, in which the primary activity is revising drafts of diverse writing projects, such as term papers, scholarship application essays, and statements of purpose. Throughout the corpus, recurrent misalignments are noticeable between the tutors striving to adhere to the tutoring guidelines and the tutees acting contrary to these guidelines. Two tutoring guidelines are particularly salient in these misalignments: the guideline for participation frameworks and the guideline against proofreading/editing.
First, the analysis delineates how the participation frameworks for the revising activity are established in the opening of the writing tutorials, focusing on the participants' orientation to the guideline regarding participation frameworks in WC tutorials. Analytic focus is given to cases where the tutor and tutee negotiate who takes on the role of writing on the printed draft, each participant proposing competing participation frameworks. During this negotiation, two inherently contradicting guidelines—the guideline for the use of pens/pencils and the guideline regarding the tutees' agency—become relevant for the tutors. In resolving the dilemma, the tutors comply with the former guideline through their embodied conduct while complying with the latter guideline through the linguistic format of their turns.
Second, the analysis details how requests for grammar assistance are formed by the tutees and responded to by the tutors, focusing on their respective orientations to the guidelines against proofreading/editing. In their responses to the tutees' requests for grammar assistance, the tutors display sensitivity to the formation of the request. Requests interpretable as seeking error correction confront the tutors with conflicting guidelines, the proscription of proofreading/editing, on the one hand, and the prescription of supporting the tutee as an ally and counselor, on the other. The analysis reveals how the tutors skillfully manage the dilemmatic demands through their response practices. Lastly, the analysis also sheds light on the tutee's orientation to the guideline against proofreading/editing in their socialization process towards becoming a knowledgeable member of the HWC community.
The study contributes to CA research on institutional interaction by uncovering how professional guidelines work as a deontic resource in situ and how that deontic authority shapes professional-client interaction. It also advances research in Writing Center Scholarship by responding to a longstanding call for empirical studies and by complementing the limited but growing body of CA research on writing tutorials at WCs. More particularly, the conversation-analytic findings can usefully inform the development of alternative tutoring guidelines and in this way advance WC pedagogy.
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Linguistics, Pedagogy, Conversation Analysis, Deontics, Institutional Interaction, Participation Frameworks, Requests, Writing Centers
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199 pages
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