Questioning as advice resistance: writing tutorial interactions with L2 writers

“Someone Is Watching Me While I Write”: Monolingual Ideologies and Multilingual Writers Behind the Scenes of L2 Writing Tutorials

“…This assertion of rhetorical creativity is not uncommon among multilingual doctoral students, who often have content expertize (Merkel, 2018) and disciplinary writing experience to manipulate genre conventions (Negretti & Mcgrath, 2020). To resist rhetorical suggestions, Fatima avoided confronting moves and instead employed implicit moves (Park, 2017). However, unlike Park who noted that implicit moves allow writers to adopt alternative revisions, Fatima’s attempts were either prematurely interrupted or misinterpreted as a struggle to understand suggestions.…”

“…In light of the observed power imbalances, both Thonus (2004) and Williams (2004b) observed that, unlike L1 writers, multilingual writers have an “unshakeable belief in the authority of the writing tutor” and are less likely to reject suggestions (Thonus, 2004, p. 236). However, in a more recent study, Park (2017) showed how multilingual writers issued questions to implicitly resist suggestions and adopt alternative revisions. While shedding light on more implicit power dynamics, Park did not account for what prompts the need for such resistance acts.…”

“…This debate has mainly been informed by studies employing Vygotskian (e.g., Yu, 2020) and sociolinguistic perspectives (e.g., Park, 2017), yet none have questioned ideologies that perpetuate native‐speaker literacy practices as non‐negotiable defaults. Canagarajah (2019) argued that globalization has created contact zones where participants must negotiate diverse “literacy dispositions,” or socialized literacy habitus (p. 99), to achieve successful meaning uptake.…”

Editorial

“…Drawing on the analysis of 21 one-to-one L2 writing tutorials at a British University, the final paper (Leyland 2018) of this volume explores resistance as a resource for achieving consensus. Leyland adds on to the growing body of research on writing tutorials (eg Park 2014Park , 2017 by revealing that international students, when resisting the tutor's advice, display orientations towards their own level of competency. These responses have the potential to become resources for tutors to diagnose problems and come up with solutions based on the specific needs of the students.…”

Applying critical discourse analysis to classrooms

“…Varied interpretations of, and approaches to, classroom discourse are needed in order to adequately uncover the nuances of teaching and learning in classrooms. A classroom, for example, is not a monolithic context where all learning is organised according to teacher-fronted lessons, but can also include spaces where pedagogical support is offered through online mentorship (Ball 2014), video conversations between young adult learners in technologymediated environments (Sindoni 2011), and tutor sessions for second language writers (Park 2017), to name a few. Interpretations and approaches to discourse are even more varied, including, but of course not limited to, repair sequences (Stone 2019), positioning (Kayi-Aydar 2013), translanguaging (Li Wei and Lin 2019), social justice (Archer 2014), and epistemic status (Heller 2017).…”