{"title":"“Oops! I can’t express this in English!”: managing epistemic challenges by Chinese EFL peer tutors in writing tutorials","authors":"Fenghua Chen, Xueyu Wang","doi":"10.1515/text-2020-0139","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2022-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Text & Talk","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0139","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
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.
期刊介绍:
Text & Talk (founded as TEXT in 1981) is an internationally recognized forum for interdisciplinary research in language, discourse, and communication studies, focusing, among other things, on the situational and historical nature of text/talk production; the cognitive and sociocultural processes of language practice/action; and participant-based structures of meaning negotiation and multimodal alignment. Text & Talk encourages critical debates on these and other relevant issues, spanning not only the theoretical and methodological dimensions of discourse but also their practical and socially relevant outcomes.