Writing centers provide invaluable writing assistance to students, and students who have used writing centers typically come to this conclusion themselves. Despite these positive responses to writing center tutorials, motivating first-time users to go to the writing center can be challenging.
Currently my high school writing center tutors are delivering asynchronous sessions, offering three hours a day of live face-to-face dialogue, and committed to the discussion that is writing. To admit that my tutors are high school students, grades nine through twelve, should not surprise you in that we’ve all seen a movement pushing for writing centers to appear at the secondary level, but what might surprise you is that my high school students are also online learners.
This article presents a study and a methodology to investigate whether students with different learning styles make use of the potential flexibility of online learning materials, i.c. in the context of an online writing center. The study aims to investigate the effect of learning styles on (a) the students’ approach to the writing task (process), and (b) on the letters they write (product).
This paper charts the development of a small departmental writing center at a university in Japan. The paper discusses the results from two semesters of an ongoing action research project focused on improving the usage of the center.
In Summer 2012, I became the director of the Writing Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (UL). I was not new to the university or the Writing Center; I had been a faculty member since 1996 and held other administrative positions in the department. So when I stepped into the position, I had some ideas of what I wanted to do to expand our center.
University students are asked to act within and master a diverse range of genres as student writers and researchers (Nesi & Gardner, 2012). Although the difficulty in performing such a task is considerable for first language (L1) writers, second language (L2) writers face similar yet also different rhetorical and linguistic demands and challenges.
The purpose of this article is to share lessons learned in setting up three different peer online writing centers in three different contexts (EFL, Generation 1.5, and ESL). In each center the focus was on the language learner as a peer online writing advisor and their needs in maintaining centers “for and by” learners.
The history of online writing centers is a history of doubt. I experienced those reservations in 2009, when, in addition to traditional face-to-face peer tutoring, I launched my own online peer tutoring program and began training undergraduates to respond to student submissions.
Like many writing center directors, I was hesitant to introduce online tutoring. However, because of limited physical space on campus, the internet provides the only room for growth available to us—a problem faced by many writing centers (Carpenter 2). The inevitability of online growth is also supported by the increase of tertiary-level online and blended courses being offered at most post-secondary schools.
In what follows, I briefly situate this conversation about distance tutoring within the rhetorical canon of delivery. Then, I describe my own experiences tutoring in a graduate writing center (GWC) at Penn State University as a way to add experiential examples to Grutsch McKinney’s discussion of Skype and Google Documents (Google Docs).