Second language academic writing at university level – Benefits of tutoring dialogue

Fifty years of immigration has resulted in a highly multilingual society and today Sweden hosts around 150-200 mother tongues beside Swedish. Teachers and researchers in both mandatory as well as higher education are struggling to find new ways to meet the challenge of teaching students in their second language.

The most significant measure taken at Swedish universities to meet this challenge, has been to implement academic recourse centers and academic text labs where students are offered tutoring by instructors specialized in academic writing. The University of Gävle offers academic text counceling in such a text lab which is visited by students from all subject areas.

We know from prior research that second language learners in higher education struggle with the formal features of academic texts. Research has also established that learning generally benefits from scaffolding and dialogue. But there is very little research on the benefits of tutoring academic text skills through dialogue in higher education.

The present paper focuses on academic texts written by second language learners of Swedish at university level. The data consists of comparison between second language texts before text and after text tutoring. The primary research question concerns which linguistic and textual features are successfully improved in the second version of the text. This study will contribute to our understanding of second language writing tutorship, the nature of qualitative second language writing feedback as well as second language writing development in higher education.