Student Interactions with a Native Speaker Tutor and a Nonnative Speaker Tutor at an American Writing Center

Abstract

Although research on tutoring nonnative speaker (NNS) students has grown in the past two decades, many of these studies have either pre- dominantly focused on native speaker (NS) tutors or have been written with the assumption that all tutors are NSs. Thus, NNS tutors have been largely neglected. The purpose of this study is to examine how one NNS student interacts with one NNS tutor and one NS tutor in a writing center at the college level. These two sessions were video-taped, transcribed, and then analyzed in detail using the methodology of conversation analysis. After each session was analyzed, a retrospective interview with the NNS student was conducted to explore her opinions of these tutorials. Interview data shows that the NNS student preferred the NS tutor over the NNS tutor by virtue of their NNS/NS status. The conversation analysis of the actual tutorials, however, reveals that the NNS student preference is likely due to the fact that the N