Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 17, No. 2 (2020)

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: LANGUAGE AND LEARNING IN THE WRITING CENTER

Tristin Hooker
University of Texas at Austin
praxisuwc@gmail.com

Fiza Mairaj
University of Texas at Austin
praxisuwc@gmail.com

We here at Praxis are proud to present our spring issue. Spring 2020 has been an unprecedented semester all across North American higher education (let alone the world), and has seen writing centers adopting new and often ad-hoc practices as we attempt to continue serving students and pushing the field during a global pandemic. Because so many of us were not able to meet face-to-face and many of us were not even able to meet synchronously, the consideration most of the pieces in this article give to pedagogy, adaptation, the importance of language, and the effect and affordances of digital pedagogies and technologies is more timely than we could have known when we began putting this issue together. We are glad to be returning to you during these times, and we hope that the pieces here will continue the deep conversations our field has been building up to and during these times.  

We open with Jeaneen Canfield’s column, “Centering the Writing Classroom: A Practice of the Dialectic.” Answering Jackie Grutsch McKinney’s call for empirical research in the field, Canfield reflects on data from her own IRB-approved classroom study, and on the ways that writing center theory and writing instruction praxis have influenced one another. This column begins our investigation into the adaptive pedagogies that weave in and through our writing center practices. 

In “Reading and the Writing Center: Tutor Education and Praxis,” Amanda Greenwell, Renée Lavoie, Gissel Campos, Sarah Gerrish and Mary Joerg discuss how one writing center altered their tutor education course to include a focus on reading support. This article includes examples from both tutors and tutor educators to outline four reading-focused aspects of the tutor education course. Greenwell et al. conclude their findings by especially discussing how the reading strategies can help the English as Second Language (ESL)/ second language writers (SLWs).

Continuing with the theme of facilitating and incorporating ESL writers in the writing center, Sarah Patrick draws our attention to an important population within second language writers (SLWs): Chinese international students. In “Chinese International Students’ Reactions to Tutor Talk: Using Scaffolding Strategies to Support Language Acquisition in the Writing Center,” Patrick undertakes a qualitative study to analyze the effects of several scaffolding techniques used in sessions with Chinese international students who were SLWs by the tutors. The results of the study provide insight into the do’s and don'ts of interpersonal techniques employed by the tutors, specifically with this population. 

Jing Zhang, Havva Ozer and Raneem Bayazeed further include writing center participants' voices in their mixed methods study. They examine the participants’ perceptions of Grammarly and face-to-face tutoring at the writing center and the comparison of the two. In “Grammarly vs. Face-to-face Tutoring at the Writing Center: ESL Student Writers’ Perceptions,” readers will find the interesting discussion of what the current available technology has the potential of replacing and what needs of the participants are being unaddressed by said technology. Zhang, Ozer and Bayazeed provide many recommendations and implications of their research as it relates to English as a second language writers and other writing center personnel.  

We see another strand of digital pedagogy and analysis in the writing consultation in Courtney L. Werner and Diana Lin Awad Scrocco’s “Tutor Talk, Netspeak, and Student Speak: Enhancing Online Conferences.” Through discourse analysis of the transcripts of four synchronous online writing consultation chats, Werner and Scrocco identify specific patterns in tutor/student interactions, and make recommendations for the most effective affordances of synchronous online tutoring--something that many writing centers are now unexpectedly working with for the first time. 

We then turn to another kind of history-in-the-making. In “The State of Writing Center Research Across the Atlantic: A Bibliometric Analysis of a German Flagship Journal, 2010-2016,” Pam Bromley and Andrea Scott invite us to observe the early development of writing studies--and writing centers--as a new field in German-speaking countries. Through a bibliometric analysis of citations in the first issues of the most prominent German-language writing center journal, Bromley and Scott shed light on what matters to the field as it emerges, both in its subject matter and in terms of authorship. 

Finally, we close with two book reviews. In Amber Kent-Johnson’s Review of Multimodal Composing: Strategies for Twenty-First-Century Writing Consultations, edited by Lindsay A. Sabatino and Brian Fallon, we see a continuation of our pedagogical and technological themes. 

Kent-Johnson finds this guide to designing and developing multimodal composition projects to be both helpful in training tutors and also likely to withstand repeated readings and technological developments. On the other hand, in her review of Radical Writing Center Praxis: A Paradigm for Ethical Political Engagement, by Laura Greenfield, Oksana Moroz finds Greenfield’s argument for radical transformation to be inspiring, but calls upon her own background to lay out the dangers of radicalism without the infrastructure and organization to implement new programs.     

Finally, we here at Praxis want to take a moment to thank our readers and our most brilliant and diligent review board for their continued support, especially in these uncertain times. We want to extend our thanks to the University of Texas at Austin for ensuring that the unexpected turn of events this semester, did not hinder our ability to bring this piece to you in a timely manner.