Abstract
With the international growth of English-medium education, tertiary institutions are increasingly providing academic support services to L2 students, and thus, the number of writing centers working with L2 student writers has also increased. Writing center practices originated in L1 English educational contexts and their appropriateness for L2 English writers requires examination. This study investigated the effect of writing center consultations on the essay writing skills of L1 Arabic foundation level students at an English-medium university in the Gulf region. Analysis was based on quantitative measures of writing ability of two distinct groups of students: an experimental group who participated in tutoring sessions at the university’s writing center and a control group who did not. Findings indicated that students who participated in writing center consultations scored significantly higher in overall essay writing scores, as well as in two aspects of writing: task fulfilment (that is ideas) and text organization/coherence. These findings contribute to a limited bank of similar empirical studies on effectiveness of writing center sessions on students’ essay writing ability. They also support the case for the expansion of writing center work beyond the domains of predominantly L1 English academic communities.
Highlights
Since writing centers became a common component of learning support services on United States (U.S.) college campuses, scholars have called for rigorous research to investigate the effectiveness of their practices (e.g., North 1984b; Driscoll and Perdue 2012)
As the purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of writing center tutorials on the writing ability of students, a review of the existing literature was conducted to locate studies similar to this one with quantitative methods that examine the relationship between writing center tutorials and writing ability
With the growth in writing centers operating outside the U.S (Rafoth 2014; Hyland 2018), the current study aims to fill a gap in the literature by focusing on the impact of writing center tutorials supplementary to in-class writing instruction in an L2 English higher education context with
Summary
Since writing centers became a common component of learning support services on United States (U.S.) college campuses, scholars have called for rigorous research to investigate the effectiveness of their practices (e.g., North 1984b; Driscoll and Perdue 2012). The number of writing centers operating in English-medium institutions outside the U.S has increased significantly (Rafoth 2014; Hyland 2018). There is a growing number of writing center practitioners who work almost exclusively with L2 English student writers. With this growth, the need for site-specific research into the appropriateness and effectiveness of writing center practices in non-traditional writing center contexts has come to the fore. The research presented here examines the efficacy of a writing center at an English-medium university in the Gulf region, focusing on the impact of one-to-one writing consultations on the essay writing skills of L1 Arabic students enrolled in the university’s foundation program. The present report addresses first, the international growth of writing centers and the theoretical case for the efficacy of writing center consultations, followed by a review of previous studies into the efficacy of writing center consultations and a rationale for writing assessment
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