Writing center tutoring consists of a variety of speech acts, including suggestions. The results of the study discussed in this article show that different factors may affect the use of various suggestion linguistic realization strategies at face-to face writing center sessions, including the influence of a person’s first language, home country culture and level of L2 proficiency, social distance, power and imposition, and other social and psychological factors. All of these factors should be considered when training writing center tutors so that they can use different and appropriate forms of providing suggestions.

Performing speech acts has been regarded as a complex phenomenon that intrinsically involves interaction between at least two participants (Jiang, 2006; Koester, 2002). For example, suggestions are the acts in which the speaker asks the hearer to perform an action that will potentially benefit the hearer (Rintell, 1979). They belong to the group of directive speech acts which, according to Searle (1976), are those in which the speaker’s purpose is to get the hearer to commit him/herself to some future course of action.

Studies (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, 1999; Kuriscak, 2010) suggest that not all speakers in their native language (L1) produce and respond to suggestions and other speech acts in the same way. Second language (L2) learners also show much variation in how they perceive and carry out their own or react to others’ speech acts. As demonstrated in many studies (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, 2001; Félix-Brasdefer, 2003; Matsumura, 2003; Owen, 2002; Taguchi, 2007), linguistic competence does not necessarily correlate with pragmatic competence. At some point in my work as a writing center tutor, this made me assume that various factors, including location of the interaction, age and social status of the interlocutor, the level of familiarity with the interlocutor and the culture of the interlocutor’s home country as well as various personality measures, study abroad experience, motivation, and L2 proficiency level should influence L2 speakers’ production and reaction to others’ speech acts, including suggestions. This also gradually made me realize that using different strategies of providing suggestions in accordance with the specific features of a particular communicative situation is one way to ensure effective communication between tutors and students at face-to-face writing center consultations.

Writing centers can be regarded as an example of such a place where the aforementioned factors interact with each other, and where they determine students’ pragmatic and writing development in a certain language. Writing centers aim to help students improve their writing through individualized assistance. However, successful study depends on good communication between tutors and student writers (Fujioka, 2012). Fujioka (2012) concludes that pragmatics can play a key role in effective communication in writing center practice that studying writing center tutoring sessions, with their rich language interactions and opportunities as a learning place for both tutors and student writers, can enhance our understanding of human interaction and development from both applied linguistics and educational perspectives. Thus, when writing center tutoring is conducted in students’ L1s and especially in students’ L2s, it is important that tutors attend to pragmatic elements that affect tutoring talk and help students communicate smoothly in the tutoring session.

Writing center tutoring consists of a variety of speech acts. Tutors compliment students’ writing, request information about the content and purposes of writing, and offer suggestions for improvement, while students coming to writing centers may request tutors to repeat utterances as well as accept or reject tutors’ suggestions (Fujioka, 2012). The proper use of these speech acts depends on one’s knowledge and understanding of communication norms and traditions associated with L2 interactions. At the same time, as it was shown earlier, another pragmatic aspect implying the existence of different social norms and cultural values is associated with suggestions in a variety of languages. Providing and interpreting suggestions expressed by writing center tutors and student writers in appropriate ways is one of the prerequisites ensuring effective communication between tutors and students at the consultations organized by writing centers.

The importance of understanding different peculiarities of using various suggestion linguistic realization strategies (SLRS)—that is, pragmalinguistic forms of providing suggestions (e.g., Martínez-Flor, 2010; Wolfson, 1983)—for avoiding miscommunication between tutors and L1 or L2 writer students explains the necessity of investigating forms of suggestions used by writing center tutors and their clients in different communicative situations which may take place in writing center practice. Therefore, this study examines and presents various similarities and differences observed in the ways of using different SLRS at the writing center sessions conducted by the tutors being the native or nonnative speakers of English for the students who are also the native or nonnative speakers of English.

The corpus consisted of 17 transcripts of the consultations at the writing center of one of the U.S. universities located in the south-central part of the country. All those consultations were videotaped in 2014 for investigating the intonation units observed in the speech of tutors and clients. Each consultation lasted 45–65 minutes (mostly 50–55 minutes). Twenty-seven subjects (10 tutors and 17 students) were involved in this study, including six native-speaking (NS) and four nonnative-speaking (NNS) tutors (both male and female) as well as nine NS and eight NNS students (both male and female too). All sessions analyzed in this study were divided into four major groups: 1) the sessions conducted by NS tutors for NS students, 2) the sessions organized by NS tutors for NNS students, 3) the sessions conducted by NNS tutors for NS students, and 4) the sessions by NNS tutors for NNS students.

In the process of research, a transcription of writing center consultations retaining the phonological images of words and sociolinguistically relevant information was used. All features of natural speech (including word repetitions, use of interjections and pause-fillers, occurrences of stumbling, etc.) were reflected in the transcription and preserved in the examples cited in this article. After transcribing all 17 sessions analyzed in this study, the occurrences of suggestions provided at those sessions were identified and categorized into the groups and subgroups included in Martínez-Flor’s (2005) classification of different kinds of SLRS (see Table 1).

Table 1. Taxonomy of Suggestion Linguistic Realization Strategies
(from Martínez-Flor, 2005, p. 175)

As shown in Table 1, the first type of suggestions involves that of direct strategies, in which speaker clearly states what he/she means. Direct suggestions are performed by means of imperatives and negative imperatives, a noun of suggestion, and performative verbs (e.g., I suggest that you buy a new laptop). The type of conventionalized forms for suggestions still allow the hearers to understand the speaker’s intentions behind the suggestion, because the illocutionary force indicator appears in the utterance, although this second type of suggestion realisations is not as direct as the first type. Within this group, there is a greater variety of linguistic realisations to be employed, such as the use of specific formulae, expressions of possibility or probability, suggestions performed by means of the verbs should and need, and the use of the conditional (e.g., Have you thought about buying a new computer?). This group of suggestions may also include the expressions of inclination, or a particular disposition of the speaker him/herself toward the things discussed with his/her interlocutor(s) (e.g., I want to use in this phrase the preposition in rather than at as it is done in the current variant of your writing). Finally, the group of indirect suggestions refers to those expressions in which the speaker’s true intentions are not clearly stated. These indirect forms for suggestions do not show any conventionalized forms. That is, there is no indicator of the suggestive force in the utterance, so the hearer has to infer that the speaker is actually making a suggestion. The use of different impersonal forms has been regarded as a way of making indirect suggestions and the use of hints is considered the most indirect type of comment that can be employed to make a suggestion (e.g., It would be helpful if you bought a new computer; Martínez-Flor, 2010). Understanding these differences between various forms of providing suggestions should help writing center tutors ensure their effective communication with clients and, eventually, the higher level of uptake of tutors’ advice.

Beside systematizing all SLRS identified in this study into different categories in accordance with Martínez-Flor’s (2005) classification, this data set also includes information about the token frequency of using different kinds of SLRS in all four groups of writing center sessions analyzed in this project. It means that the percentage data used in our analysis refer to the overall frequency of providing suggestions in the transcripts of the study, including the instances of the suggestions having the same structure and containing the same lexical units. Calculating and comparing the token frequency of using different kinds of SLRS in different kinds of writing center sessions enabled me to determine what kinds of these strategies tend to prevail in each of them, as well as to identify and interpret the trends observed in the use of different forms of SLRS by NS and NNS writing center tutors in their actual work with NS and NNS students.

This study reveals that the use of suggestions in different kinds of the writing center sessions analyzed in this study is characterized by some common and varying features. Information about the presence (“+”) or absence (“–“) of certain SLRS, which were revealed in different groups of writing center consultations, is presented in Table 2. They also indicate the token frequency of using various SLRS in all four groups of the sessions investigated in this study. Observations regarding the use of direct suggestions in writing center practice are summarized in Table 2.

Table 2. Variety and Token Frequency of Using Direct SLRS at Writing Center Sessions

The results suggest that the widest range of direct SLRS was observed in the transcripts of the sessions conducted by NS tutors for NS students. In particular, while imperative forms of verbs and performative verbs were used in all or almost in all kinds of writing center sessions, the Negative Imperative strategy of providing suggestions was observed only at the sessions conducted by NS tutors for NS students, for example:

Tutor (T): Only because it could be Master’s plural because more than one people, and then again it could be…But even if, I mean, they are always called Master’s, so I’d like you wouldn’t say “my Master degree.”

Student (S): Right.

In this example, the tutor preferred to use the direct negative imperative form of providing suggestions (“I’d like you wouldn’t say…”) to show the student what he/she (the tutor) wouldn’t like the student to do. It is interesting that in this case (as well as in some examples of using this strategy revealed in the transcripts), the imperative verb form is mitigated with the help of the subjunctive construction “I’d like you.” This probably makes the tutor’s suggestion not so categorical and not so peremptory as it would sound without the use of this or any other similar mitigation device.

It is quite possible that the Negative Imperative strategy was employed at the sessions conducted by NS tutors for NS students because of NS tutors’ wish to emphasize the importance of certain things while being not afraid of becoming too strict or persistent in their work with NS students. This tendency can also be explained by the fact that English is the first language for all of those tutors and students. Besides, as they have lived in the United States for at least most of their lives, it is logical to assume that they are highly familiar with the traditions of communication that are popular in the American culture. Hence NS tutors’ and NS students’ expectations about each other’s English proficiency and familiarity with the local traditions of communication in different situations are quite high, which enables NS tutors to use a variety of SLRS in their comments and remarks.

It also follows from the data presented in Table 2 that the NS and NNS tutors working with NNS students tended to use the imperative forms of verbs and performative forms of SLRS more often than the NS tutors working with NS students and the NNS tutors working with NS students:

T: This is the one, I mean, your other career goal… Ja, it’s what I would suggest.

S: Okay.

In this case, the tutor showed explicitly that his/her advice about making certain grammar changes in the student’s writing was based on his/her own experience and on his/her own assumptions. At the same time, the use of the performative verb to suggest made the tutor’s suggestion more noticeable and persuasive (even if it was mitigated with the help of would).

Perhaps a more frequent use of the imperative forms of verbs and performative forms of SLRS in tutors’ work with NNS students is connected with tutors’ wish or necessity to simplify their language when communicating with NNS students. In the case of NNS tutors, feeling more “at the same social level” with NNS students rather than with NS students may have stimulated them to become more directive in such cases, too.

The results of the study suggest that the smallest range of different kinds of direct suggestions was observed in the transcripts of the sessions conducted by NNS tutors for NNS students. A more limited number of different kinds of direct SLRS used in NNS tutors’ remarks compared to those of NS tutors can be connected with the fact that, unlike the NS tutors working at the university where this study was conducted, the NNS writing center consultants working at that university have lived in another country for at least most of their lives. Therefore, they may be not very familiar with the local traditions of communication and particularly with the pragmatic norms preferred in American culture. Numerous studies (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1990; Matsumura, 2001; Rintell, 1979) reveal that, because English is not the L1 for NNS tutors and NNS students, some limitations in the use of certain SLRS can also be connected with NNS tutors’ and NNS students’ level of L2 proficiency, as well as with the actual level of their familiarity with the local traditions of communication in different situations.

Some other tendencies reveal themselves in the use of different conventionalized forms of providing SLRS at writing center sessions (see Table 3).

Table 3. Variety and Token Frequency of Using Conventionalized Forms of Providing SLRS at Writing Center Sessions (Click image to enlarge)

The data in Table 3 reveal that the majority of different kinds of conventionalized forms of providing SLRS (including the Possibility/Probability, Need, Specific Formulae, and Conditionals SLRS) were used in all four groups of the sessions analyzed in this study, for example:

T: …And then you can come to this quotation and to this conclusion…

S: Yeah, I think so.

In this example, the use of the second-person pronoun you and the modal verb can in the tutor’s suggestion allowed the student to infer that the tutor expected some reaction from him/her and that the student could either agree or disagree with the tutor. This is likely why the student said “Yeah” in his response to the tutor’s comment.

It is interesting that in most cases, the token frequency of using different kinds of conventionalized forms of providing SLRS was rather similar in different kinds of sessions, too. It is also worth noting here that some conventionalized forms of providing SLRS (namely, the Possibility/Probability, Specific Formulae, and Conditional forms) prevailed over direct and indirect SLRS in all four groups of writing center sessions. This tendency can be probably connected with the popularity of these forms of providing suggestions in different languages and cultures. Their frequent use by the NS and NNS tutors working with NS and NNS students may also have been caused by the tutors’ understanding of the rules of politeness and their experience of communicating in different social situations.

Though most of the conventionalized formulae were identified in all kinds of writing sessions, the Inclination form of providing suggestions was observed only at the sessions organized by NNS tutors (both for NS and NNS students), for instance:

T: Okay. I’ll just cross this off, then.

S: Okay, right.

As can be seen from this example, of all conventionalized forms of providing SLRS, the Inclination suggestions are the most categorical ones. It is possible that NNS tutors tended to use them in those situations when they were confident in the validity of their suggestions, and perhaps in those cases when their current level of English proficiency did not let them use some other linguistic and rhetorical means for making their utterances sound stronger and more persuasive (e.g., certain evaluative and emotional lexical units, idioms, emphatic constructions, rhetorical questions).

The Inclination form of providing suggestions was observed only at sessions by NNS tutors. This may be explained by the influence of NNS tutors’ home country culture, their previous teaching experiences in their home country, and their communicative behavior in the host country. Their tendency to be more direct in general and some possible limitations caused by their current level of L2 proficiency and familiarity with the local traditions of communication in different situations could also be regarded as the factors leading them to use the Inclination form of providing suggestions in their writing center practice.

It is also important to mention here that, while the Obligation form of providing SLRS was used at most of the sessions investigated in this project, it was not found in the transcripts of the sessions conducted by the NNS tutors working with NNS students. Perhaps the absence of the Obligation form of SLRS in this group of writing center sessions is connected with the wish of NNS tutors not to put too much pressure on NNS students. Being not so confident about the validity of some of their suggestions compared to NS tutors and feeling as if they were at the same social level with NNS students rather than with NS students may have influenced NNS tutors’ avoidance of employing the Obligation form of SLRS in their work with NNS students, too. To some extent, this resembles the results of Banerjee and Carrell’s (1988) study, which showed that NNS are significantly less likely to make suggestions in potentially embarrassing situations than NS. NS and NNS tutors’ and students’ expectations about their actual knowledge of the necessary pragmatic norms and about their previous experience of communication in some similar situations could also play some role in NNS tutors’ avoidance of using the Obligation form of providing SLRS in certain situations. Perhaps this also explains why in their work with NS and NNS students, NNS tutors tended to use a greater number of sentence modifiers for mitigating their suggestions, compared to NS tutors.

Finally, the findings related to the use of indirect SLRS at the writing center sessions are presented in Table 4.

Table 4. Variety and Token Frequency of Using Indirect SLRS at Writing Center Sessions

As shown in Table 4, almost all groups of tutors and students (except the NS tutor-NNS students’ group) applied both forms of indirect strategies. Though the Impersonal form of SLRS was not used only by the NS tutors working with NNS students, the Hint form of SLRS could be observed in all four groups of the sessions analyzed in this study, for example:

T: This theme of diversity forms the rhetoric of the speech. You use the word rhetoric a lot.

S: Yeah, I know. Oratory, for example?

In this case, adding the hint “You use the word rhetoric a lot” stimulates the student to come up with a synonym (oratory). Formulating his/her suggestion in the form of a hint made the tutor’s comment less categorical and more indirect at the same time.

As follows from the results of the analysis, the use of hints and impersonal SLRS prevailed at the sessions of NNS tutors conducted for NS students:

T: It’s also better to paraphrase this part, not just to repeat.

S: Okay.

The use of the impersonal pronoun it and the absence of any first- or second-person pronouns and downgraders in this suggestion made the latter sound more direct and didactic. So, it is not surprising that the student just replies “Okay,” not showing any attempt to add anything to the tutor’s suggestion or to express his/her opinion about its usefulness in this particular case. In this connection, it is possible to conclude that the ways of formulating one’s suggestions and the choice of certain SLRS may either amplify or minimize the threat to the hearer’s face and thus either increase or reduce the impact that suggestions make on the interlocutor.

Prevalence of hints and impersonal SLRS at the sessions organized by NNS tutors for NS students may be connected with a lower degree of NNS tutors’ confidence in the effectiveness of their suggestions in such cases, as well as with their willingness to share the responsibility for the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of their suggestions with the students themselves.

Based on the findings in previous research (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1990; House & Kasper, 1981; Koike, 1994; Matsumura, 2003), it is possible to assume that the aforementioned tendencies regarding the use of different kind of SLRS in the four groups of writing center sessions analyzed in this study could have been caused by different factors. First, the differences observed in the ways of using various kinds of suggestions can be associated with the influence of students’ L1s and the culture of their home country culture as well as with the level of NNS tutors’ English language proficiency at the time of conducting the study. The degree of their familiarity with the local traditions of communication in different social situations might have influenced their certain pragmatic choices as well. Finally, some social factors, including the factors of social distance, social power, and imposition, as well as the differences in understanding of the principle of modesty peculiar to different cultures, might have had much impact on choosing or not choosing this or that strategy of providing suggestions by NS and NNS tutors working with NS and NNS students.

The results also suggest that NS and NNS tutors’ suggestions may occasionally consist of more than one move. In such cases, tutors’ remarks usually (but not always) include several different kinds of SLRS which are combined together and which can be traced in one or two moves comprising such a suggestion:

T: So…Yeah, let’s read on—I will say, maybe…Could we put a mark in? This is what I would suggest. Is that after this sentence? I’m ready to get to your topic.

S: Okay.

In this fragment of the writing center session conducted by a NS tutor for a NS student, the tutor used a specific conversational formula (“let’s read on”), a question pointing to the fact of having the possibility of undertaking a certain action (“Could we put a mark in?”), and a performative verb (suggest in “This is what I would suggest”). In this case, the tutor preferred to use several forms of direct and conventionalized kinds of SLRS at the same time, which should have increased the impact of his/her suggestions on the student’s further actions and behavior regarding the student’s future writing activities.

At the same time, occasionally the NS students working with NNS tutors participated in coproducing suggestions with their tutors, helping them express the necessary thoughts and ideas in English:

T: En…So maybe consider…

S: …breaking the paragraph off from right here.

T: Right. Uh-huh.

In this fragment, the tutor began to express a suggestion (“So maybe consider…”). As the tutor made a longer pause then (while, probably, searching for appropriate English words and formulating thoughts in English), the student continued formulating the tutor’s suggestion, based on his/her own assumption about the idea which the tutor might have planned to express in his/her suggestion. The tutor’s reply (“Right”) points to the fact that the student’s guess regarding the final part of the tutor’s suggestion was probably correct. It is possible to say that in a few cases, NNS tutors and NS students were coproducing suggestions. This tendency was not typical of the other groups of writing center sessions analyzed in this study, which is probably connected with the fact that during NNS tutors-NS students’ sessions, the NNS tutors for whom English is not the first language were working with the NS students for whom English is the first language and who therefore should have faced fewer difficulties when expressing the necessary thoughts and ideas in English.

These observations reveal that the structure of suggestions and the ways of providing them may highly vary in NS and NNS speakers’ utterances, depending on specific peculiarities of a certain communicative situation, speakers’ motivation, their own and their interlocutor’s social and cultural background, speakers’ L1 and the level of their L2 proficiency, various psychological and social factors (e.g., social distance, power, and imposition), as well as speakers’ understanding of the concept of politeness and the degree of their familiarity with the pragmatic norms that are culturally accepted in the culture where a concrete instance of communication takes place. A combination of all these factors explains the complexity of pragmatic variation which, as previously shown, could be observed in the use of different kinds of SLRS by NS and NNS speakers in writing center settings. Therefore, it is logical to conclude that all aforementioned factors need to be considered in the system of training writing center tutors so they can use and react to different forms of these and other speech acts in appropriate ways. According to Wolfson (1989), the lack of pragmatic competence can easily lead to a negative interpretation of the interlocutor’s personal traits and stereotypes of other cultures. In this connection, it is logical to assume that taking the aforementioned factors into account can be helpful for writing center tutors in terms of using various strategies of providing suggestions as effectively as possible in the different communicative situations they may encounter during face-to-face writing center sessions.

The findings in this study may also have some importance in terms of planning the content and purposes of EFL/ESL, business English, introduction into speech, and other classes connected with the questions of language use and communication. Because suggestions reflect certain values underlying different cultures, instruction regarding the use of these speech acts can enhance students’ cultural literacy as well as their linguistic control of these speech acts. Besides, as shown by Martínez-Flor (2010), learners’ suggestions have often been regarded as direct, unmitigated, and less polite than those made by NSs. In this connection, numerous researchers (e.g., Koike & Pearson, 2005; Martínez-Flor & Fukuya, 2005; Martínez-Flor & Alcón, 2007) suggest that some pedagogical intervention may be beneficial to make learners become pragmatically competent when performing suggestions. Through training and/or instruction, writing center tutors and L2 learners can become better prepared for providing and interpreting others’ suggestions as intended. In the long run, all this should contribute to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding.

Click images to enlarge.

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Olga Muranova is currently a fifth-year PhD student majoring in TESOL/applied linguistics and a graduate teaching/research associate in the English Department at Oklahoma State University. Her research interests include text linguistics (especially the linguistic and rhetorical features of popular science texts), discourse and genre analysis, stylistics, intercultural bilingualism, English for specific purposes teaching, and teaching ESL/EFL writing.