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Presenter: Ada Shavo

Faculty Sponsor: Edwin Everhart

School: UMass Amherst

Research Area: Linguistics and Language Studies

Session: Poster Session 6, 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM, Auditorium, A72

ABSTRACT

The UMass Writing Center exists at the nexus of competing pressures regarding language, where institutional pressure for students to conform to standard academic language conflicts with the Center’s mission to help students write in whatever voice they choose. While the Center cannot fully separate from the larger institution, tutors believe that its role as an enclave within the institution might enable it to create small ripples of change. Tutors and clients must therefore contend with these conflicting pressures within tutoring sessions as they work together on clients' writing, where it is unclear whether the Center functions as a site of assimilation, change, or some mixture of both. Using linguistic anthropological methods of participant observation and interviews with clients and staff of the UMass Writing Center, I studied how tutors and writers negotiate these pressures. Preliminary findings indicate that a main strategy that tutors in the Writing Center use to mitigate the pressures of standardization is to offer choices. Tutors hope to help clients make educated decisions between standard and nonstandard options rather than presenting the standard as default, but the effectiveness of this method remains to be seen. This study contributes to efforts to advance linguistic justice by investigating whether the Writing Center can succeed despite its limited ability to create structural change.