Writing Center Studies Research Papers (original) (raw)

At institutions with significant populations of international and English Language Learning (ELL) students, writing centers are one of the best, if only, campus services that help with composition and language learning. However, institutions do not often provide adequate academic support for ELL students, who are frequently, but not always, international students (Nowacki, 2012). And there is rarely a sufficient support apparatus for these students to learn language (Nowacki, 2012). Given the high-stakes pressure for ELL students to demonstrate proficiency in English (Thonus, 1993), ELL students often use writing center services disproportionately in comparison to their native English-speaking peers. Despite the fact that ELL students use writing center resources in high numbers, there has been no correspondingly expansive body of writing center literature focused on this population (Nowacki, 2012). In order to not reinvent the wheel, it can be productive for writing centers to look to other fields for guidance on ELL students. For our purposes here, we found the field of research on teacher education to be useful and generative, as scholars in that space have, for decades now, considered the ways to best attend to the needs of ELL students in teaching and learning. In that field, a body of work termed linguistically responsive pedagogy (LRP; e.g. Aguilera et al., 2020; Lucas, 2010; Lucas et al., 2008) seemed particularly promising as a frame for enriching the work of writing centers with ELL students. Across our findings in this chapter, we understand there to be substantial overlaps between the work of writing center consultants and linguistically responsive educators. Our goal is to think about what LRP scholarship might offer writing center tutors working to better serve multilingual students. Because of the overlap we find between LRP literature and writing center research, we argue that writing centers can look to work on linguistically responsive pedagogies for constructing new writing center approaches for ELL students. We begin by examining the relationship between writing centers and ELL students in order to bring attention to the overlap between LRP and writing centers. We then provide an overview of linguistically responsive pedagogy. Lastly, we offer recommendations for how writing centers can translate LRP principles into writing center theory and practice.