A US writing center tutor’s interventions in an L2 doctoral student’s dissertation writing

Second language (L2) doctoral students may seek various sources of assistance for their dissertation writing, one of which can be a university writing center tutoring service. Despite increasing attention to writing center assistance with L2 graduate writers, few studies have documented what types of interventions writing center tutors make to L2 students’ doctoral dissertations and what prompts those interventions. This study tries to fill this gap, by adding empirical evidence concerning a tutor’s response to an L2 student’s dissertation drafts. The focal participant was a US writing center tutor, an L1 English writer and a doctoral student herself, who was tutoring an L2 English-speaking Taiwanese doctoral student. The two met over multiple tutoring sessions to discuss the student’s (tutee’s) drafts of his dissertation in the field of education. Main data sources included tutoring transcripts from nine consecutive tutoring sessions, the tutor’s multiple interviews, and the tutee’s original and revised drafts with the tutor’s suggested rewriting. The triangulated data were inductively coded and then categorized thematically. Analysis revealed a fixed pattern of the tutor’s constructing the tutee’s text through oral dictation, which consisted of three types: sentence rewriting (tutor’s correcting tutee’s faulty or incomplete sentence to an intact sentence), sentence revision (tutor’s revision and editing of the sentences she had already corrected), and sentence generation (tutor’s dictation of a newly constructed sentence which was not included in the tutee’s original text). The tutor’s text-builder role was incongruent with not only her writing center rule but the doctoral student advocacy role she claimed for herself, in which she emphasized promoting her tutee’s ability to demonstrate reasons for what he was writing. The tutor’s internal inconsistency and her extensive interventions into the tutee’s text suggest an urgent need for discussion of ethical issues and what makes effective tutoring.