Stepwise

^†I borrow the term “stepwise” from Sacks (1992, pp. 561-569). In discussing topical organization in conversation, Sacks refers to a stepwise move as a practice that “involves connecting what we’ve [the participants] just been talking about to what we’re [the participants] now talking about, though they are different” (p. 566). Although the practice discussed in this paper does not concern topical movements, I use the term to indicate the participant's progressive movements away from the other's previous turn. In Jefferson's (1984) terms, the participant “gradually disengages” from aligning with the previous turn “over a span of talk” (p. 198). While Jefferson (1984) and Heritage and Sefi (1992) use the term “stepwise” to refer to an overall sequence organization that consists of multiple turns across different speakers, in this study, the term refers to the practice within a single speaker's multi-unit turn.

advice negotiation in writing center peer tutoring

Abstract

While the delivery and reception of advice is a practice integral to a wide range of settings, little attention has been given to the detailed practices of advice resistance and how it leads to advice negotiation. Based on 7 hours of videotaped tutoring interactions among 6 tutors and 11 tutees, this conversation analytic study examines the interactional practices of advice negotiation in peer tutoring at an undergraduate writing center. In particular, the study focuses on advice negotiation sequences in which students initially resist tutors’ advice. The findings are in line with the current knowledge that advice resistance is presented and treated as interactionally dispreferred. In addition, the analyses contribute to further specifying the stepwise interactional practices through which advice resistance is produced and managed in a way that it results in successful advice negotiation with the more tailored advice forwarded by the tutor. The study shows how the context of tutoring is a site not only for knowledge development but also for the negotiation of epistemic rights and their interactional management by both participants.

Keywords:

• conversation analysis
• advice negotiation
• advice resistance
• peer interaction
• writing center
• tutoring

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Christine Holten for her support in gaining permissions to access invaluable data. I am also grateful to the journal editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on the previous draft.

Notes

^† I borrow the term “stepwise” from Sacks (1992, pp. 561-569). In discussing topical organization in conversation, Sacks refers to a stepwise move as a practice that “involves connecting what we’ve [the participants] just been talking about to what we’re [the participants] now talking about, though they are different” (p. 566). Although the practice discussed in this paper does not concern topical movements, I use the term to indicate the participant's progressive movements away from the other's previous turn. In Jefferson's (1984) terms, the participant “gradually disengages” from aligning with the previous turn “over a span of talk” (p. 198). While Jefferson (1984) and Heritage and Sefi (1992) use the term “stepwise” to refer to an overall sequence organization that consists of multiple turns across different speakers, in this study, the term refers to the practice within a single speaker's multi-unit turn.

1. In certain sequential environments, however, unmarked acknowledgements may create ambiguity as they may not necessarily convey implicit resistance but show agreement (Pudlinski 2002; Silverman 1997).

2. The students’ language background is diverse. For this study, however, native speakers of English have been selected as subjects.