“Oops! I can’t express this in English!”: managing epistemic challenges by Chinese EFL peer tutors in writing tutorials
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Fenghua Chen
Fenghua Chen is a PhD candidate in education at University of New Hampshire, and is currently associate professor at Nantong University. Her research interests include second language writing and empirical studies on writing centers.
Xueyu Wang received her PhD in linguistics from Nanjing University and is currently professor at Nantong University. Her research interests include identity construction, teacher talk and classroom interaction, and discursive practices in the educational context.
Abstract
This study focuses on Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) peer tutors’ discursive behavior to manage epistemic challenges in writing tutorials at a local university in China’s Mainland. Based on approximately 24 h of audio-recorded interactions involving eight tutorial groups over six weeks, we searched different types of epistemic challenges to Chinese EFL peer tutors and explored how they managed them discursively. Our findings, in adopting a CA (Conversational Analysis) approach, show that Chinese EFL peer tutors mainly experience two types of epistemic challenges – the language proficiency-based challenges and the resistance-based challenges. They construct different identities to cope with these challenges – EFL learners, careless but competent tutors, and authoritative and trustworthy experts. These practices are realized through valuable pragma-linguistic devices, including advising and assessing speech acts, deontic modality, self-mocking expressions, imperative and assertive tones, narrative discourse, and smiley voice and laughter. These findings highlight the need for writing center instructors to follow tutor training guides suitable for EFL peer tutors instead of following a universal training recipe.
Funding source: Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research in Jiangsu Province
Award Identifier / Grant number: 2019SJA1460
About the authors
Fenghua Chen is a PhD candidate in education at University of New Hampshire, and is currently associate professor at Nantong University. Her research interests include second language writing and empirical studies on writing centers.
Xueyu Wang received her PhD in linguistics from Nanjing University and is currently professor at Nantong University. Her research interests include identity construction, teacher talk and classroom interaction, and discursive practices in the educational context.
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Research funding: This study was supported by Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research in Jiangsu Province (grant no. 2019SJA1460).
| Transcription Symbols | |
| (.) | Micro-pause (less than 0.2 s) |
| (0.0) | Pause (time in seconds and tenths of a second) |
| [ ] | Overlapping talk |
| - | Abrupt cut-off of preceding sound |
| = | Next speaker latching on |
| underlined | Accented sound or syllable |
| # … # | Smiley voice |
| (xxx) | Inaudible sound |
| ((laughs), (shrugs)) | Paralinguistic and nonverbal information |
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- “Oops! I can’t express this in English!”: managing epistemic challenges by Chinese EFL peer tutors in writing tutorials
- Nextness and story organization: ‘my day’ sequences in parent-child interaction
- Interactional functions of truncated predicative complement construction “AP + (dek)le” as topic initiator in Shanghai Wu Chinese conversation
- Lifting the pen and the gaze: embodied recruitment in collaborative writing
- The Love Letters: ethnopoetics and echoes of the past in a Danish spoken narrative of personal experience
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- “Oops! I can’t express this in English!”: managing epistemic challenges by Chinese EFL peer tutors in writing tutorials
- Nextness and story organization: ‘my day’ sequences in parent-child interaction
- Interactional functions of truncated predicative complement construction “AP + (dek)le” as topic initiator in Shanghai Wu Chinese conversation
- Lifting the pen and the gaze: embodied recruitment in collaborative writing
- The Love Letters: ethnopoetics and echoes of the past in a Danish spoken narrative of personal experience
- Referential accessibility as an index of the discourse functions of predicative and specificational clauses
