Consulting based on who (I think) you are: Patterns of interaction in online writing center consultations based on perceived and documented identity

Abstract

Recently, writing centers have been expanding their services to include synchronous and asynchronous online consultations. This raises a range of questions about consultant training, consultant-student interactions, and experiences of different groups of students in the online environment. A small, but growing, body of scholarship is addressing these gaps (e.g., Severino, Swenson, & Zhu, 2009; Weirick, Davis, & Lawson, 2017), but many questions remain unexamined. As a methodologically rigorous examination of the writing center interactions rooted in a theoretical framework, this study is informed by language socialization (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986; Ochs & Schieffelin, 2017) and scaffolding theories (Mackiewicz & Thompson, 2013) to analyze online interactions between consultants and students. These theoretical frameworks have been used to effectively examine strategies appearing in face-to-face writing consultations, but have not been applied to online contexts, thus giving this project an opportunity to extend the approach further and gain a deeper understanding of interactions in online writing center conversations. This study looks at perceived (multilingual/non-multilingual) and documented (international/domestic) identity datasets, combining qualitative and statistical analyses to explore correlations between students’ linguistic identity and the interaction patterns. Findings show distinct patterns of providing feedback within both perceived and documented datasets, with statistically significant differences in the number of words per session, number of words used by consultant, total number of comments, use of cognitive scaffolding strategies, questions, content-based comments, genre analysis, rhetorical explanations, and rapport-building comments. The findings of this study support previous literature in demonstrating the multi-directional nature of language socialization processes within writing center consultations and go further by highlighting the connection between the language socialization process and patterns of engagement. This finding is reinforced in looking at the types of feedback provided to students, where I show that the use of cognitive scaffolding strategies is similarly a multi-directional process supporting the consultants, as well as the students.