Literacy Practices and Learning at a University Writing Center

This research project investigates literacy as a social practice by focusing on an underresearched educational site: the university writing center. A writing center can play an important role in training and supporting university students in the development of their academic writing. The site of this study is a writing center at a university in Hong Kong whose goal is to help students become effective and independent writers in English. It offers students free one-to-one writing sessions. Students reserve a session in advance, and bring their writing assignments to the center at the appointed time. For 30 minutes, the student and a peer tutor work together on specific aspects of the student’s writing, using English as the medium of communication. For students for whom English is a second language (L2)—the vast majority of university students in Hong Kong in general, and the users of this writing center specifically—establishing understanding in the tutoring session itself may become a challenge. This raises an important question: How do the tutors and the students at the university writing center achieve mutual understanding when accomplishing their literacy tasks? Although many studies have investigated literacy practices in diverse institutions, there is a lack of empirical research that examines how L2 writing activities in a writing center evolve as social interaction, and how or whether the participants benefit from participating in them. To fill these gaps, this research project focuses on two key areas: (1) the interactional organization of the L2 writing consultations and the multimodal practices through which the participants accomplish the institutional agenda; and (2) the participants’ learning process during their involvement in the literacy events involved in the consultation, and changes in their practices over time. The project will use conversation analysis as an analytical approach. This analytic work will focus on what the participants say, how they say it, and what embodied or environmental resources they use in their achievement and maintenance of mutual understanding. By doing so, this study will result in a detailed description of how the participants engage in specific literacy practices while achieving the institutional agenda in an efficient and timely manner. The project will shed new light on literacy practices in educational institutions. The findings will be of use to students of English and their teachers around the world as well as for tutor training purposes at the center.