A multiple-case study of emergency remote tutoring at a university writing centre in Hong Kong : in search of a competency model for consultant training and tutoring

Abstract

The practice of writing centre peer tutoring has been introduced in a few Hong Kong universities, creating an out-of-class avenue where student-writers can discuss their writing with trained consultants in one-to-one writing consultations. However, no research to date has offered a multi-layered description of the implementation of writing centre peer tutoring in the Chinese non-native-English-speaking context. The research literature argues that such insight will facilitate the formulation of a more context-appropriate version of the writing centre theory. Online learning induced by the coronavirus pandemic has also raised the need to document the maintenance of writing centre peer tutoring in a web conferencing environment.

Using the writing centre theory as its theoretical framework, this study filled these gaps through examining the implementation of remote peer tutoring at a writing centre in a research-intensive English-medium university in Hong Kong. To achieve this overarching objective, a qualitative multiple-case study approach was deployed to focus on the ways three writing centre consultants conducted writing consultations with individual student-writers. At the time of data collection, two of the case study consultants were second-year undergraduates, with the third being a final-year research postgraduate who had richer academic and research writing experiences than the two undergraduate consultants.

Each case study comprised recordings of authentic writing consultation sessions and a consultant background interview, with the former being the primary data set. The sample sessions were studied with reference to a three-level analytical framework, modified from Bhatia’s (2017) ideas for critical genre analysis, in order to yield a description of the intertextual, interdiscursive, and institutional features of the interactions between the case study consultants and the student-writers. The analysis was supplemented by the consultants’ views on writing centre peer tutoring elicited in individual semi-structured interviews, which were analysed through thematic content analysis.

A range of intertextual, interdiscursive, and institutional features of the sessions were identified. Four common intertextual resources were utilised to link the immediate consultant-writer talk to other prior and future discourses: textual elements in student-writers’ work, external voices, discourse of language and writing instructions, and planning talk. The sessions also exhibited an interdiscursive blending of seven discourse-types: advisory, evaluative, expository, instructive, interrogative, regulatory, and service encounter. At the institutional level, eight key communication strategies were noted: icebreaking, goal-setting, giving praise and showing empathy, invoking the (hypothetical) reader, questioning, stepwise entry, managing directive guidance, and concluding. The interdiscursive and institutional features, however, varied case-by-case.

The multi-level description of writing centre interactions in the present study contributes to the enrichment of the writing centre theory and consultant training. This study offers discourse evidence and ideas for the implementation of web-enabled individual peer tutoring, thereby adding to the growing literature on emergency remote teaching. This study also sheds light on peer learning among Chinese learners, suggesting how writing centre consultants may act as writing informants who guide their peers to become better writers and how consultants’ and student-writers’ academic status and epistemic asymmetry may influence the pattern of dyadic interaction.