Examining Our Lore: A Survey of Students' and Tutors' Satisfaction with Writing Center Conferences

This article discusses issues of accessibility and how user-centered and participatory approaches can inform empirical research to guide the Universal Design of virtual spaces and influence writing center efforts for students with disabilities. Because this article describes how to integrate usability/accessibility testing for online and in-person services, it can work as a model for writing centers struggling with the challenges of serving students with disabilities. Toward this end, the article discusses two generations of usability testing on a large, well-established online writing lab (the Purdue OWL), as well as the collaborative projects that emerged between the usability team and campus disabilities services as a result of this testing. The article concludes with heuristics and generative questions that may assist readers in developing similar projects tailored to their own contexts.

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Role Reversals: A Case Study of Dialogic Interactions and Feedback on L2 Writing

Merkel

2018

Journal of Second Language Writing

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Much scholarship on second language writing feedback has focused on teacher-L2 writer dialogic interactions. Many of these studies, however, adopt the concept of scaffolding (Hyland & Hyland, 2006) which in its application could be considered a deficit model (Cumming & Riazi, 2000) as the teacher addresses linguistic limitations of the learner. This study explored reversing these roles, drawing on the Bakhtinian (1981) concept of dialogism to explore feedback interactions where the L2 writer and I (the researcher) were both developing understanding. An 11-week participant-researcher case study sought to examine the role of dialogic interactions in which I had more advanced English language skills, but had less extensive knowledge about the content, while the participant was developing (an already advanced) English proficiency, but held critical knowledge in the content area. Results showed that dialogic interactions facilitated the linguistic revisions of the participant's writing by contributing to the participant's increased awareness of audience, and also providing her a channel, through speech, to clarify text excerpts that I struggled to understand in writing.

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Examining Our Lore: A Survey of Students' and Tutors' Satisfaction with Writing Center Conferences

Cited by 20 publications

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Situation Definition and the Online Synchronous Writing Conference

Situation Definition and the Online Synchronous Writing Conference

Writing Centers and Students with Disabilities: The User-centered Approach, Participatory Design, and Empirical Research as Collaborative Methodologies

Role Reversals: A Case Study of Dialogic Interactions and Feedback on L2 Writing

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