Tutor Talk: Do Tutors Scaffold Students' Revisions?

This study explores the impact of tutor talk on students' revision practices. We applied Mackiewicz & Thompson's scheme for classifying tutoring strategies from their 2015 Talk about Writing, with some variation to suit our writing center context. With an exclusive focus on tutor talk, they did not assess the impact of tutor talk on the writing itself nor on the writer's responses to the conversation with the tutor. Thus, in our study we sought evidence of a relationship between the different types or patterns of tutor talk and the extent of revisions a writer made to their essay after a writing center session. Our mixed-methods study found that in 80% of sessions (n=8), students revised based on tutor talk, and in two sessions, students applied tutor talk to sections of their paper not discussed in the session.