| Summary: | This research concerns itself with the exploration of methods used to support student-writers‘ learning opportunities, as employed by teachers and by their students in teacher-student writing conferences; particularly the cadences of role construction and negotiation of viewpoints between peers in student-student writing conferences, within the context of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programmes‘ pre-sessional writing courses in a UK university. The author poses two distinct questions: first, what methods are employed in the supporting of students‘ learning processes in terms of teacher-student writing conferences? Second, what tactics are taken in peers‘ role construction and viewpoint negotiation in student-student writing conferences? The study utilises a Conversation Analysis-informed methodology and interrogates its research data: namely audio/video recordings of 32 spoken teacher-feedback sessions and nine spoken peer-feedback sessions taken over a period of six months. Data analyses in this study reveal the massive importance that writing conferences play in jointly constructing the student‘s critical judgment and knowledge in preparation for academic literacy development. The study explores a number of interactional strategies used by teachers in support of student learning; giving special attention to the ―scaffolding technique‖, and how it assists students by maintaining their interest and enthusiasm for their studies, and by creating a shared frame through the teacher appearing to share responsibility for the learning, like an accomplice to the student. The study also considers the role of student-student interactions in promoting and developing learners‘ supporting arguments through engaging in the sheer complexity of these sessions. Overall, the study suggests and emphasises the importance of teachers and the requirement for them to create and to maintain opportunities for productive dialogue activities—as with writing conferences—by using an array of interactional strategies, all of which lead to students‘ joint and active participation for solving any problems that they may encounter during their journey to higher education, equipping them with all the knowledge and know-how that they need for their future studies.
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