ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the peer tutors’ use of directives and its relationship to dialogic versus monologic teaching. Tutoring guidelines and handbooks promote a ‘non-directive and minimalist tutoring approach’, in which tutors help students to identify their problems and find solutions by themselves, enabling them to deal with similar tasks in an independent and self-regulated manner. The qualitative analysis of the directives in the most dialogic and most monologic tutorials was carried out collaboratively. Most universities offer students the opportunity to seek assistance with their academic writing in one-to-one tutorials, which are usually conducted by English for Academic Purposes practitioners or learning advisors. The extracts from Daisy’s tutorial illustrate that even when the directives she uses are direct and/or unmitigated, they are not face-threatening or imposing, because they are part of the dialogue with the student and therefore co-constructed. The monologic tutorial displayed an overall higher level of indirectness and mitigation than the dialogic tutorial.
