ABSTRACT
In addition, rather than examining microlevel elements such as keywords and lexical bundles, this chapter focuses entirely on the macrolevel of student writers' talk, specifically, what student writers talked about when they obtained and held the conversational floor and concomitantly what they talked about when they took up and maintained control over their conferences and thus over their learning. Writing center researchers have examined tutor and student writer control in terms of turn length as well. Writing center researchers have operationalized conversation control in other ways as well. When tutors were not familiar with the discipline, they focused on sentence-level concerns and, it seems, sometimes missed opportunities to push student writers' thinking further. The chapter discusses the author's overall findings about the frequency of student writers' very long turns (VLTs) across their conferences' opening, teaching, and closing stages. It also discusses the content of their VLTs and the tutor questions that sometimes generated them.
