| Current research on institutional discourse demonstrates the importance of analyzing participants' social relationships, such as their expert/non-expert statuses, as being co-constructed on a moment-to-moment basis as well as being constructed by their pre-existing, institutional roles (He, 1995; Jacoby & Gonzales, 1991; Jacoby & Ochs, 1995; Ochs, 1993). This view has implications for the institutional setting of the university writing center. Much writing center literature has claimed that writing center tutors, especially peer tutors, are better able (than writing instructors or expert tutors) to promote collaborative discourse in which students are empowered to discuss their ideas and their writing (e.g. Brannon, 1982; Clark, 1985; Garrett, 1982; Healy, 1993; Meyer & Smith, 1987; North, 1982; Podis, 1980; Reigstad & McAndrew, 1984).; This study of 24 writing center tutoring interactions uses both qualitative analysis and quantitative distributional analysis of participants' politeness choices (as delineated by Brown and Levinson, 1987) in relation to the moment-to-moment knowledge domain, i.e. discourse activity, that they are oriented to in order to investigate whether peer tutors promote student authority. Previous research has demonstrated that the knowledge domain to which discourse participants are oriented will affect their status alignment to one another (Jacoby & Gonzales, 1991; He, 1995; van Lier, 1988). This study investigates the extent to which participants' enactment of the roles that are available to them shifts as the discourse activity to which they are oriented shifts. Tutors' and students' enactments of their institutional representative and client roles, their expert and non-expert roles, and their peer roles, are examined in five discourse activities in order to investigate systematically how and when participants' alignments shift. This sort of investigation is worthwhile given the potential ideological conflicts tutors face as they attempt to carry out the long-term, constructionist goal of improving students' writing skills even while they attempt to meet the short-term, student and institutional goal of correcting and normalizing students' individual texts.; This study finds that although writing center philosophy and writing process theory call for tutors to enact a peer or reader role, most of the time tutors enact a higher status, expert role. It is suggested that the extent to which tutors assert higher status is due to the extent to which interactions focus on less substantive, editing aspects of writing rather than the idea-based, content-oriented aspects of writing prioritized by writing center philosophy and writing process theory. However, this study also finds that when the discourse is oriented to content or the writing as an assignment, students asserted expert status as well. |
