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The article outlines the technical writing tutorial (TWT) that preceded an advanced ESL writing course for students of English Philology at the Jagiellonian University. Having assessed the English skills of those students at the end of the semester, we found a statistically significant increase in the performance of the students who had taken the TWT in comparison to the control group who spent the time of TWT doing more traditional exercises. This result indicates that technical writing books and journals should be considered as an important source of information for teachers of writing to ESL students.

Writing Across the Curriculum places considerable demands not only upon the students in writing intensive courses, but also on the writing center staff to whom they go for help. This paper looks at some of the problems raised by tutors in this situation, and presents a case study in which such problems are negotiated in the course of a consultation between a student and a tutor. The kinds of revision resulting from this process are explored for the light they can throw on the relationship between language and content, as well as the relationships among discipline teachers, tutors, students, and the students’ texts. One aim of the Writing Across the Curriculum movement is that every teacher should be a writing teacher. However, while WAC assignments provide opportunities to write, the work of helping students to do it often falls to tutors in writing centers; and both tutors and teachers have expressed uneasiness about such consultations for a number of reasons. First, WAC assignments can challenge the tutors’ priority of respecting students’ ownership of their texts. What does it mean to own your text if you are writing on a topic set by somebody else, drawing on other people’s ideas, and conforming to conventions of structure and voice imposed by a discipline? Conventions of one sort or another have always surrounded writing, and even students’ “personal” writing is often largely a matter of reproducing commonplaces (see, e.g., Bartholemae). However, it is in the context of writing for unfamiliar disciplines that students and tutors are forced to confront these issues, identify the constraints and opportunities peculiar to writing in each discipline, and work within them. This brings

It’s a cloudy Thursday morning in November, and the university writing center is humming. A peer tutor sits at a table near the center of the room, listening to a sophomore explain her essay assignment for a recreational therapy class while a second tutor helps a freshman fine tune his thesis statement for a research paper. In the far corner, a third tutor works at a computer, responding to an on-line submission from a student in a local high school’s creative writing class. The director is conferring with a member of the mathematics department on ways to include meaningful writing activities in an advanced calculus class. It’s a typical day at a college-level writing center, but it raises a question for educators. Are similar scenes occurring in our public secondary schools? As an awareness of the importance of writing as a means of learning has grown, the writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) movement has gained momentum on college campuses. One response to this increased focus on the importance of writing in the learning process has been the establishment of writing centers at hundreds of colleges and universities. These centers are designed to serve the needs of both students and faculty and aim to support learning in all fields. While these programs have flourished in many post-secondary settings, formal WAC programs in general and writing centers in particular still seem to be something of an exception in secondary public schools; however, interest in these practices appears to be growing there as well. A number of publications show an increasing integration of WAC philosophy and strategies into secondary public school settings. Pamela Farrell’s The High School Writing Center: Establishing and Maintaining One not only provides practical information on designing and running writing labs in secondary schools, but also illustrates the variety of forms

Describes the Writing Center at Johnson County Community College as an institution that implements democratic ideals in its staffing and teaching; and where all voices are heard, encouraged, and validated. Describes three things necessary to achieve a writing center with a democratic nature: a peer-tutor program including formal tutor training; financial support from the college; and college-wide support.

Over the past ten years or so, much has been written about whether writing center tutors should be generalists or specialists: when tutors help clients from other disciplines, is it an asset for the tutors to be familiar with discipline-specific discourse conventions? Scholarship attempting to answer this question has been bi-polar: either tutors should be generalists, or they should be specialists. On the specialist side, some scholars argue that tutors’ knowledge of discipline-specific discourse conventions is important to the success of tutoring sessions, since the tutoring should revolve around the rhetoric of the discipline (Kiedaisch and Dinitz; Tinberg and Cupples: Shamoon and Burns). Judith Powers and Jane Nelson, for example, argue that

Contents: C. Murphy, J. Law, Introduction: Landmark Essays on Writing Centers (1994). Part I:Historical Perspectives. R.H. Moore, The Writing Clinic and the Writing Laboratory (1950). L. Kelly, One-on-One, Iowa City Style: Fifty Years of Individualized Instruction in Writing (1980). M. Harris, What's Up and What's In: Trends and Traditions in Writing Centers (1990). P. Carino, What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Our Metaphors: A Cultural Critique of Clinic, Lab and Center (1992). G. Olson, E. Ashton-Jones, Writing Center Directors: The Search for Professional Status (1984). J. Simpson, What Lies Ahead for Writing Centers: Position Statement on Professional Concerns (1985). J. Summerfield, Writing Centers: A Long View (1988). Part II:Theoretical Foundations. S.M. North, The Idea of a Writing Center (1984). K.A. Bruffee, Peer Tutoring and the Conversation of Mankind (1984). L. Ede, Writing as a Social Process: A Theoretical Foundation for Writing Centers? (1989). A. Lunsford, Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center (1991). C. Murphy, Writing Centers in Context: Responding to Current Educational Theory (1991). A.M. Gillam, Writing Center Ecology: A Bakhtinian Perspective (1991). M. Cooper, Really Useful Knowledge: A Cultural Studies Agenda for Writing Centers (1994). Part III:Writing Center Praxis. J. Simpson, S. Braye, B. Boquet, War, Peace, and Writing Center Administration. D. Healy, A Defense of Dualism: The Writing Center and the Classroom (1993). R. Wallace, The Writing Center's Role in the Writing Across the Curriculum Program: Theory and Practice (1989). R. Leahy, Writing Centers and Writing-for-Learning (1989). H. Kail, J. Trimbur, The Politics of Peer Tutoring (1987). A. DiPardo, Whispers of Coming and Going: Lessons From Fannie (1992). M. Woolbright, The Politics of Tutoring: Feminism Within the Patriarchy (1992).

This article offers a narrative account of Weaver's experience tutoring a Deaf student ('Anissa') in a writing center. Weaver analyzes the discourse of the student's professors to demonstrate the audist practices of assessment as well as the broader audism sadly typical of many classroom environments. Through relying on Deafness and ASL as the epistemological basis of the tutoring sessions, Weaver and the Deaf student are able to identify 'the hidden audist assumption in the reading/writing process' (250) as well as better enable Anissa to write in English. [Tara Wood, Margaret Price, & Chelsea Johnson, Disability studies, WPA-CompPile Bibliographies, No. 19]

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Despite all the time and energy invested in tutor training programs, some tutors seem to have a hard time letting go of ineffective tutoring practices or adapting to particular writing center policies. For instance, Victoria and Pete both work at a

This study provides descriptive analysis of a 20-hour training program to prepare peer tutors to work in a writing lab. The subjects included 20 first-year MBA students who demonstrated proficiency in writing and interpersonal skills. Nine students chose to participate. The analysis includes conversations, actions, and reflections of peer tutors during the training period. The process involved instructors with peer-tutor training experience, a selection procedure that incorporated a student-centered philosophy, several general meetings to orient and deal with concerns about tutoring, and a number of simulated sessions that moved the tutors from sentence- to discourse-level concerns.

All of us involved in writing ccnters (indeed, all of us in education) must recognize that the educational community of the 1 990s will continue to grow more diverse culturally, linguistically, scholastically. Given this diversity, students, teachers, and tutors will become more, not less, interdependent. The ready, predictable answers and assumptions that existed once in a monocultural classroom or university don't exist anymore. "Success" will not be meted out by one authoritative figure, but will be measured by the mutual nature of the success, hinging on the degree to which all members of this threesome of tutor, student, and teacher can become what Paulo Freire calls the "subjects" of their own learning process. Our hopes for these redefined social relationships in the writing center carry with them hopes for a redefined sense of academic literacy as well. Multi-cultural student populations will not only change social relationships but challenge monolithic conceptions of academic literacy. We will need to seek out views of student literacy that will emphasize interdependence, such as the ones articulated in David Blcich's The Double Perspective , Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holzman's Writing as Social Action^ and Deborah Brandt's Literacy as Involvement. By situating literacy in social relationships and communal action, these studies have begun, as the title of a recent article by Bleich makes

Any writing center coordinator soon finds that a good portion of her job involves efforts to build, maintain, and increase the number of writers using the center's services. Nevertheless, articles on writing centers rarely focus on promoting services and referral issues. Jim Bell's analysis of The Writing Lab Newsletter for a four year period, for instance, shows a dominant interest in tutoring methods (65 articles) with far fewer articles concerned with administrative issues (37 articles), and only 1 1 of those 37 articles focus on promoting the lab (2-3). To find a sound discussion of this issue, I turned to a 1984 survey by Gary Olson, which illustrates just how important an instructor's referral can be in developing a student's attitude toward writing center visits. Olson reminds us that the instructor who threatens students with a referral can devastate a writer who already has a poor self-image ["Johnny, if you don't show some improvement, I'm just going to have to send you to the writing center" ( Further, such demeaning oral referrals in front of a classroom of reluctant students enforces the myth that ". . . the writing center is merely for remediation" (Olson 160). Additionally, in his article "Collaborative Learning in Context: The Problem with Peer Tutoring," Harvey Kail explains why normally well intentioned colleagues might work against their own best classroom interests. Kail reminds us that writing centers threaten the traditional roles of English department members since, through their discussions with students, tutors and coordinators gain clear insights into the workings of an instructor's classroom. Instructors who are threatened by such a possibility may be those who believe the center should perform by what Kail calls the

Collaboration between student writers appears in various guises: small groups discuss each writer's paper in turn; a pair of classmates exchange papers to read and critique; a whole class evaluates a few students* papers based on an established set of criteria; a student shares her paper with a peer tutor at a writing center. All of these situations attempt to capture and build on the energy and shared learning that occur when students work together. And yet, while both the writing center and the classroom aim for collaborative learning, each context places the students in a different relationship. In the classroom, the students work together as peers under the teacher's guidance; in the writing center, students must work to overcome the disparity of authority inherent in their given roles of tutor and tutee. The difficulty for writing tutors lies in balancing their more powerful position as tutor with the goals of peer collaboration. Thus, collaboration in writing takes different forms and requires different skills in the contexts of classroom and writing center. This paper will use a study of a high school writing center program to illustrate and explain these differences. We hope that this discussion will provide insight into how writing tutors perceive and cope with their roles in a writing center and how the collaboration that occurs in a writing center affects students as writers and as people. Kenneth Bruffee's definition of collaborative learning provides a framework for understanding the difference between classroom and writing center collaboration. In his article, "Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind,1 " Kenneth Bruffee explains that " Collaborative learning provides a social context in which normal discourse occurs: a community of knowledgeable peers" (644). Adapting Thomas Kuhn' s theories about the scientific community, Bruffee emphasizes that a group of people together determine the accepted knowledge, the "normal discourse"

Conversation is the essence of peer tutoring. We mean this statement in a radical sense. Conversation -the form of communication we use for tutoring sessions -should structure all aspects of a peer tutoring program, from tutor training to administration. Our insistence upon dialogue as the underlying structure of a peer tutoring program comes from an even more fundamental conviction that true education consists of dialogue. [ 1 ] Where dialogue is lacking, information may be transferred, but little is learned.

Although tutors are usually excellent students, they seldom have previous tutoring experience.For this reason, tutor training is an important aspect of any writing center program.A general training program -which includes two to three hours of orientation focusing on procedures, tutoring roles, responsibilities, and policies -is usually required of all new tutors.During their first semester of employment, additional training in study skills, communications, critical thinking skills, and interpersonal skills may also be required.In addition to this general training, tutors also need specific training in the tutoring of writing.Most tutors learned to write using the product method -a formal, grammatical approach with instruction beginning at the sentence level, moving to the paragraph, and finally culminating

In the basic writing program at The University of Akron, we have been using peer tutors as facilitators of collaborative learning in the classroom for two years. One day a week, each tutor has a group of six to eight students who are usually working on rough drafts. Recently, when I

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Preface 1. THE CONTEXTS OF TEACHING PERSPECTIVES Richard Fulkerson: Four Philosophies of Composition James Berlin: Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class Edward P.J. Corbett: Rhetoric, the Enabling Discipline Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner: The Problematic of Experience: Redefining Critical Work in Ethnography and Pedagogy TEACHERS Peter Elbow: Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process Donald M. Murray: The Listening Eye: Reflections on the Writing Conference Lad Tobin: Reading Students, Reading Ourselves: Revising the Teacher's Role in the Writing Class Dan Morgan: Ethical Issues Raised by Students' Personal Writing STUDENTS Mina P. Shaughnessy: Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing Vivian Zamel: Strangers in Academia: The Experiences of Faculty and ESL Students Across the Curriculum Todd Taylor: The Persistence of Difference in Networked Classrooms: Non-Negotiable Difference and the African American Student Body LOCATIONS Hephzibah Roskelly: The Risky Business of Group Work Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe: The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class Muriel Harris: Talking in the Middle: Why Writers Need Writing Tutors APPROACHES Min-Zhan Lu: Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy: A Critique of the Politics of Linguistic Innocence Mariolina Salvatori: Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition Gary Tate: A Place for Literature in Freshman Composition Carolyn Matalene: Experience as Evidence: Teaching Students to Write Honestly and Knowledgeably about Public Issues 2. THE TEACHING OF WRITING ASSIGNING Mike Rose: Writing Courses: A Critique and a Proposal David Peck, Elizabeth Hoffman, and Mike Rose: A Comment and Response on Remedial Writing Courses Richard L. Larson: The Research Paper in the Writing Course: A Non-Form of Writing Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor: Teaching Argument: A Theory of Types Catherine E. Lamb: Beyond Argument in Feminist Composition RESPONDING AND ASSESSING Brooke K. Horvath: The Components of Written Response: A Practical Synthesis of Current Views David Bartholomae: The Study of Error Jerry Farber: Learning How to Teach: A Progress Report COMPOSING AND REVISING Nancy Sommers: Between the Drafts James A. Reither: Writing and Knowing: Toward Redefining the Writing Process David Bleich: Collaboration and the Pedagogy of Disclosure AUDIENCES Douglas B. Park: The Meanings of Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford: Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy Peter Elbow: Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience STYLES Robert J. Connors: Static Abstractions and Composition Winston Weathers: Teaching Style: A Possible Anatomy Elizabeth D. Rankin: Revitalizing Style: Toward a New Theory and Pedagogy Richard Ohmann: Use Definite, Specific, Concrete Language

Initially I considered composing my own essay in order to describe how peer tutoring in writing at New York University came about, the roles played by the peer tutor in the already established Writing Center, and the techniques I used to train the tutors. But then the tutors wrote their own essays on some of these topics. They said what I'd wanted to say and more. So together we chose three of their essays which we thought best represented our collective feelings, the approaches we shared, and above all, our common enthusiasms for peer tutoring.

Peer tutoring can be a viable part of the writing lab or the classroom in both high school and college. Ideally, once tutors are selected, they should be able to enroll in a course, but in reality most high schools and colleges do not have such a course. An alternative is to offer a workshop of several short sessions to prepare them for tutoring. Training tutors in skills will obviously vary with the types of tutoring they are expected to do and the services the writing lab provides. How students are acquainted with the resources and trained to teach composing skills are problems that English teachers or writing lab directors are easily able to handle. However, we, as teachers, may sometimes forget the obvious. If tutors have not had courses in education or psychology, for example, they may lack knowledge of some principles of learning and of strategies that would enhance their ability to tutor. Training tutors in areas other than cognitive skills becomes a prerequisite to a successful program.

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In this embedded case study of a mid-Atlantic writing center, I interviewed and observed 3 writing center tutors regarding their academic language ideologies and conceptualizations of academic writing. I found that tutors focused on “grammar” when discussing academic language, and tutored in adherence with “rules” they expected professors to enforce. This demonstrated that tutors may hold a standard language ideology regarding academic writing. However, tutors also focused on student voice through style and word choice, and were concerned with overriding student voice through their tutoring practices. Because of these two conceptualizations of professor focused rules and student centered voice, tutors shifted between prioritizing the two in their tutoring sessions. Ultimately, I argue that tutors need to reimagine what it means to “sound academic” for a more linguistically just tutoring praxis.