ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the keywords in student writers' talk and the environments in which those keywords occurred. The student writers' turns at talk were often geared toward responding to what tutors had said. In particular, student writers' key use of "mmhm," a minimal response characterized by passive recipiency, revealed that their turns tended to acknowledge that the tutor can and should continue talking. The chapter analyzes the similarities and differences between the key function words in the 2000 student writers' talk and the 2017 student writers' talk. Similar to the keyword findings for the tutors' talk, "like," sharply increased in keyness from 2000 to 2017. Another noticeable difference between student writers' talk in 2000 and in 2017 was the keyness of the conjunction "so." This function word ranked 40th-most key in 2000.
