ABSTRACT
The 47 writing center conferences comprising the study corpus were collected from 2005 to 2008 at a large, comprehensive, Land Grant university in the southeastern United States. The university’s institutional review board (IRB) approved the research. In the conferences, 30 tutors worked with 47 students See table 3.1. Funded entirely by the Department of English, the writing center studied served only undergraduate students enrolled in two FYC courses and two second-year world literature courses, all four of which were general education requirements for undergraduates. Graduate students in English, most of whom taught at least one of the four required courses, and carefully screened undergraduates composed the tutoring staff. Both graduate and undergraduate tutors attended training during their first semester in the writing center, and the writing center director supervised and assessed their tutoring performance each semester. This study’s writing center setting and the process for training tutors who worked in this writing center are described in more detail in previous work (Mackiewicz and Thompson 2015).
