The writing center at the University of Lisbon adopts a widely implemented tutoring model—a non-directive approach, focusing on content and organization (higher-order concerns), and grammar and vocabulary (lower-order concerns). This study aims to challenge this model from an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) perspective by reporting and analyzing the results of a qualitative survey of 6 tutors regarding their work at the center. Results show that although all tutors comply with the imported tutoring model, most report difficulties in implementing one or both of its central principles. Therefore, EFL writing centers should harbor a flexible methodology wherein addressed concerns are context-dependent and constantly renegotiated during writing sessions, which could have pedagogical implications in the EFL classroom.

Most word association tasks (WATs) focus on semantic representations but can also illuminate other linguistic phenomena (Van Rensbergen et al., 2015). This study reports a WAT comprising 152 Portuguese verbs and their corresponding compositional deverbal action nouns ending in -ção, that aims to test whether the morphological nature of the stimulus conditions the response. The results suggest that (i) the morphological structure of the stimuli does condition the response; (ii) associations can be constrained by grammatical factors other than semantics; and (iii) L1 Portuguese speakers are more likely to respond with a word belonging to the same word family if the stimulus is a complex word.