Introduction 

An overall agreement exists that English has become the language for scientific research dissemination worldwide (Curry & Lillis, 2022; Lillis & Curry, 2010; Martín et al., 2014; Pérez-Llantada, 2012). However, other researchers (Englander & Corcoran, 2019; Hanauer et al., 2019; Yen & Hung, 2018) have found that many L2 writers experience diverse concerns while producing academic texts such as research articles for publication in English. To help L2 writers learn academic writing in English, genre pedagogy such as English for Specific Purposes (ESP) (Bhatia & Nodoushan, 2015; Paltridge, 1997; Swales, 1990) has been implemented in different academic contexts. However, not all students have access to ESP genre instruction in foreign English contexts. Genre instruction is useful to learn textual features, but it neglects the social practices such as ‘literacy brokering’, which according to Corcoran (2017), Englander (2006b), and Curry & Lillis (2019) benefits writing students. These students need support to write research articles since they are a requirement to obtain their postgraduate degrees (Carrasco & Kent, 2011; Corcoran, 2017). Thus, scholars (Curry & Lillis, 2019) claim there is a need for research on social practices involving literacy brokers, who like writing centers tutors give support and help L2 student writers (Ferris & Hedgcock, 2014; Harris & Silva, 1993). Thus, this research aims to clarify the interaction between genre knowledge, ESP, and tutoring, by studying Latin American postgraduate writers’ negotiation of academic writing (AW) in English for publication purposes, while engaged in tutoring sessions in a university writing program. In the following sections, the importance of publishing in English is explained as well as the issues academic writers face in the publication process, the limitations of ESP in addressing any social interaction writers engaged in during the writing process, and current approaches to literacy brokering through writing center feedback and tutoring.

Theoretical Framework

Publication in English

English is often the language used across fields to disseminate scientific knowledge in prestigious journals (Buckingham, 2008; Carrasco & Kent, 2011; Corcoran & Englander, 2016; Curry & Lillis, 2019; Lillis & Curry, 2010; Salager-Meyer et al., 2016). In contexts like Mexico, where English is used as a foreign language rather than as the official language of communication, undergraduates and postgraduates (including faculty and staff), are pressured into or rewarded for publishing academic research in English. Salager-Meyer et al. (2016) hold that institutions and government organizations use the Web of Knowledge to privilege English to assess scientists’ production. Publishing in English peer-reviewed journals is valued in Spanish-speaking contexts like Spain or in Mexico (where this study took place) because it contributes to promotion and economic remuneration at higher education institutions (Englander & Uzuner, 2013: Hanauer et al., 2019; Martín et al., 2014). This phenomenon might explain why Mexican scientific journals have switched to English, or why newly launched journals accept papers only written in English (Salager-Meyer et al., 2016). Thus, English has become the dominant standardized language used for scientific communication, and its use in Academic Writing (AW) for publication continues growing globally (Martín et al., 2014; Pérez-Llantada, 2012; Lillis & Curry, 2010).

Writing concerns identified in research

Research shows L2 writers face different challenges in academic writing (Gupta et al., 2022; Lin & Morrison, 2021; Phyo et al., 2023; Sulaiman & Muhajir, 2019) and publication process across disciplines (e.g., Corcoran & Englander, 2016; Englander & Corcoran, 2019; Hanauer et al., 2019; Muresan & Pérez Llantada, 2014; Yen & Hung, 2018). Gupta et al (2022) found that doctoral students with English as an additional language had issues in the writing process, in developing content/ideas, in grammar, in vocabulary, and in sentence and paragraph organization. Muresan & Pérez Llantada (2014) showed that Romanian academics faced concerns in writing up research as in clear arguments, coherence, or knowledge of the discourse conventions, and some academics had linguistic concerns in pre-publication. They looked for language professionals’ assistance before submitting their papers to journals. In addition to the language problems, the academics in Muresan & Pérez Llantada’s study faced content challenges concerning study design, content-related issues, methodology, informational resources, updated methodological training, ability to use a limited range of methodological tools, and failure to show research’s significance to the international community. Likewise, Spanish scholars, especially in the sciences, need a lot of support in writing for research publication (Martín et al., 2014). Corcoran & Englander’s (2016) study at a Mexican university reported scholars faced discursive concerns (e.g., to achieve the expected structure and rhetoric), non-discursive (e.g., lack of courses to publish research in English, of writing opportunities, time, and support, and navigating articles’ submission and review processes), or both discursive and non-discursive concerns. In another study, Corcoran’s (2017) research on an English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) course found that Mexican scholars advocated post-course research writing support, and that time for individual assistance and revision to scholars’ manuscripts contributed to writers’ confidence. Hanauer et al. (2019) found that Mexican publishing researchers across disciplines with English as a second language have in addition to the concerns cited, an increased burden that involves difficulty, dissatisfaction, and anxiety when writing science in the L2. Thus, higher order concerns (HOCs, e.g., rhetoric structure), lower order concerns (LOCs, e.g., linguistic), increased burden, and social practices like support from reviewers or literacy brokers (people [tutors] giving writing assistance to scholars (Concoran, 2017) impact scholars as L2 writers.

Genre

By the 1980s, applied linguists became interested in analyzing genres/texts at the discourse level, by focusing on language, structure, social conventions, readers and writers’ sociocultural characteristics (Nagao, 2018; Rusinovci, 2015; Xu & Li, 2018). Genre analysis contributed to programs such as ESP in the United Kingdom and other English learning contexts. In ESP, Swales (1990) defines genre by focusing on content and communicative purpose within texts (e.g., scientific reports, research articles) used in professional and disciplinary settings. ESP aims to raise learners’ awareness of text structure and help them develop skills needed to communicate in academic contexts (Paltridge, 1997). However, not all writers with English used as a foreign language have access to ESP courses; hence, foreign writers often work with literacy brokers, like tutors or editors. ESP analyses and describes the specialist discourses, but it is also necessary to understand how these are used in professional practice to cover the requirements needed in a target profession (Bhatia & Nodoushan, 2015). It is necessary to understand social practices, such as getting advice from literacy brokers like tutors, when learning professional genres. Thus, this study agrees with Curry & Lillis’ (2019) research claims to investigate how novice scholars learn social and linguistic practices entailed in publishing.

Writing for research publication in Latin America

Corcoran (2017) explains that in order to graduate, students at a Mexican university are required to publish a research article in a scientific journal. Likewise, Carrasco Altamirano & Kent Serna (2011) maintain that in various Mexican universities’ science programs, an established institutionalized requirement for doctoral students to publish at least one original academic product in an international journal from their graduate research. This focus on the publication of research articles as part of doctoral programs continues in Mexico until the present day.

To assist faculty and postgraduates with writing for publication, institutions have implemented a variety of programs (Geller & Eodice, 2013) often influenced by genre theory. Salager-Meyer et al. (2016) indicate that between 1990-2010, ESP boomed in Latin America. ESP exploded after Latin American universities required specialized English courses due to a continuous growth of pure and applied science departments (Celani et al., 1988; Salager-Meyer et al., 2016). Although more research on writing for publication support and a focus on social practices is needed (Corcoran, 2017), Englander (2006b) and Corcoran (2017) agree that social practices involving negotiation and getting advice from editors, reviewers, or other literacy brokers is beneficial. According to Corcoran (2017), social practices could be useful to novice scholars and enhance their expectations of success in publishing; particularly in contexts like Mexico, in which English is used as an additional language.

Literacy brokering

For Kheradparvar et al. (2013), literacy brokers help writers overcome issues in the process of article publication. Literacy brokers, or colleagues, reviewers, academic peers, translators, proofreaders (Lillis & Curry, 2010), authors’ editors, copyeditors (Curry & Lillis , 2019), academic mentors (Flowerdew, 1999), mediators (Lillis & Curry, 2006), shapers of research papers (Burrough, 2003; Li & Flowerdew, 2007) make an impact on English as a first or additional language-writers’ text production (Lillis & Curry, 2010). Brokers mediate text production, influence how texts will be received and evaluated while traveling from context to context, and together with researchers transform knowledge (Parashar, 2019). Literacy brokering is a common practice and solution for scholars of other languages that write to publish and who often regard writing as a challenge. However, brokering merits more attention across contexts of production because it tends to be invisible due to the private communication between interlocutors (Lillis & Curry, 2010).

Writing Center tutoring and feedback approaches

For many postgraduates, writing center tutors are literacy brokers and provide crucial feedback on both linguistic (e.g., Lower Order Concerns) and discursive (e.g., Higher Order Concerns) features of research genres. Tutors typically meet with writers one-on-one to work on writing concerns and texts. In the context of postgraduate research, tutor positioning and roles are complex. Tutors may not be familiar with writers’ research, nor with the specialized language or genre features used within the writers’ discipline. Tutors and writers also navigate linguistic and cultural differences in tutorials, as both first- (L1) and second-language (L2) writers may expect tutors to ‘correct’ their language errors or to show them where linguistic markers differ from standardized English. Liu & Harwood (2022) found that Chinese writers, mostly postgraduates, expected tutors to provide support while playing the role of a proofreader, counselor (emotional support), and/or disciplinary writing expert. While tutors adopted some of those roles in portions during the tutoring session, they believed to have also played the writing coach, ally, and/or teacher roles, which were more important to writer’s development. Mismatches between writers’ and tutors’ expectations resulted in complex negotiations during the tutoring session, where either tutors or writers expressed concerns about the draft text and dialogued about potential solutions.

In the tutoring approach, writing-center tutors working with L2 writers prioritize “global or HOCs,” such as genre expectations, organization, and argumentation, over “local or LOCs” such as grammatical errors or stylistic concerns (Severino, 2004). Similar advice is often offered to writing-center tutors providing feedback with postgraduate or advanced disciplinary writers (Fitzgerald & Ianetta, 2016). According to Craig (2016), tutors may focus the session on key features across disciplinary genres and identify sentence-level issues only as they impede the writers’ ability to make meaning. Evidence suggests that the more often L2 writers receive tutor feedback (either global or local), the more likely they are to address the feedback in their revisions (Cho & Park, 2019).

However, these approaches have been challenged by L2 writing and writing center specialists like Yu (2020), who revealed the “dynamic, fluid nature of tutor roles and strategies and the multifaceted, nonlinear, and recursive processes of the multilingual writer’s text construction and writing development” (p. 12). Tutors are encouraged to negotiate the focus of the session with L2 postgraduate and faculty writers to help them feel like their needs have been met. Such negotiation might involve the writer’s goals for the assignment, educational background, and self-confidence concerning writing abilities. In agreement with Patrick’s (2020) research, tutors can use this information to scaffold academic writing (AW) strategies and academic vocabulary into the tutorial session. Besides any immediate improvements in students’ texts, this feedback approach fosters an “indirect relationship” between the tutoring session and the writer’s subsequent drafts (Yu, 2020). To provide this feedback and engage students in the revision process, tutors use diverse questioning methods including “negotiatory questions,” that invite multiple responses from the writer rather than closed questions that limit writers’ responses (Thompson & Mackiewicz, 2014). Tutors who work with L2 writers or across cultural lines may need to be more conscious about questioning strategies to involve writers in exchanges beyond minimal utterances like “yeah,” “ok,” and “mmhmm” (Mackiewicz, 2021).

Tutors who offer support centered on students’ writing needs benefit L2 writers and give them opportunities to interact and negotiate (Ferris & Hedgcock, 2014; Harris & Silva, 1993; Leki, cited in Yu, 2020). In this study, negotiation means the sustained interaction between a tutor and a writer on research writing strategies, or linguistic problems and genre, or discursive problems (what a journal reviewer seems to mean by “academic writing skills”) that are ideally resolved through mutual comprehension (Williams, 2002). Negotiation skills mean practices including explanations, questions, agreements, or communicative actions undertaken during a tutoring session based on discussion around manuscripts (research introduction and methodology, and abstracts for dissemination) in draft form for which writers need support. According to Severino (2004), negotiation allows tutors to hear tutees’ voices while changing the writing, and advocates for tutors to be collaborators, facilitators, consultants, and coaches rather than informants, editors, evaluators, or teachers that direct and control writers’ texts. Thus, as tutors play a literacy broker role when helping writers overcome concerns, and as research claims for investigating social practices (activities [e.g., uttered questions]) like literacy brokering, which tends to be invisible (Lillis & Curry, 2010); this study aims to reveal AW skills L2 writers engaged with during tutoring.

Study Context

The study was conducted at a public university in Mexico, where the lead researcher had access to do research and to offer academic support. This university has around 30,792 students registered in postgraduate programs, 15facultades^[1] in main campus in Mexico City, and five Multidisciplinary Facultades of Higher Education (FES) in the metropolitan area. This study drew participants from two of the multidisciplinary facultades (Acatlán and Iztacala) and chemistry and medicine in the main campus.

The public university in Mexico has incorporated diverse writing initiatives (e.g., workshop, round tables) since 2011. One initiative consists in offering intensive courses of English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) to faculty and postgraduate students who need support in writing scientific articles. Trained teachers of English deliver the ERPP courses, and any university- enrolled student can register. Faculty and postgraduates receive writing support focused on the culture of publishing, genre knowledge, and L2 writing skills.

Moreover, campuses like Acatlán have implemented additional support for their academic communities. Acatlán has a huge population, a large language center (around 15 languages, including English), and teaching English programs, but it has a low number of publications. Since 2018, Acatlán has applied an AW program in English for its academic community. To determine postgraduate writers’ needs and AW skills, enrolled students at the university register in the one-to-one AW program using an online booking system. Students complete a needs analysis form on the website and book a session in a face-to-face format with an available tutor with English as an L2. Tutors have access to students’ data, so they can plan to address students’ priorities during the one-to-one session. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected this research, face-to-face tutoring sessions were stopped for safety reasons and a lack of tutors. Meanwhile, students and faculty completed interactive writing activities and watched videos about AW in English.

In other areas like chemistry, medicine, and in the facultad Iztacala, postgraduates often read articles in English and need to write for publication purposes. However, in Iztacala no individual tutoring on AW in English is provided, as opposed to the AW program implemented in Acatlán. Hence, L2 writers in Iztacala do not have structured opportunities to work on AW skills with others beyond their research advisor, and we do not know much about other individuals they may seek help from when composing disciplinary and research texts. When AW courses in Iztacala happen in a classroom, students are treated as if they had equal writing needs and by generalizing writing skills. On other occasions, in these classroom courses or sessions, the focus is on reading to share content knowledge of the cited areas.

To reveal how postgraduate writers across disciplines engage with AW skills when they negotiate feedback, research permission was obtained from the chemistry and medicine facultades on the main campus, and from the two facultades on other campuses. The study explored five L2 postgraduate writers’ online tutoring sessions with writing tutors and follow-up interviews. One of the study aims was to identify the types of writing concerns L2 writers face, as Harris & Silva (1993) suggest that knowing L2 writers’ concerns can help tutors improve their ability to work with them. Uncovering how L2 writers from different disciplines negotiate with tutors the structure of written abstract proposals for conference and journal articles’ introductions is valuable, because participating in negotiation during a tutorial is likely to improve language learning (Williams, 2002)  and can reveal insightful ways to assist postgraduate L2 writers with this task. This can be challenging when L2 writers are composing academic texts and learning new research genre structures. Structure refers to a text’s rhetorical patterns (e.g., Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, and/or CARS model “create-a-research-space” in Introductions), or underlying moves with identified purpose(s) (Swales, 1990), which according to Bhatia (1993) need to be mutually understood by the academic community in which the texts occur and which can help scholars recognize genres.

Data was gathered through recorded tutoring sessions and follow-up interviews to answer:

1. What higher and lower order concerns do L2 postgraduate writers reveal in online writing tutorials on their research articles’ introductions and abstracts?
2. How do L2 postgraduate writers at a Mexican university negotiate with writing tutors academic writing regarding their research article’s introduction and abstracts ?

Method

Participants

A convenience nested sample (n=5), extracted from a larger surveyed population and limited to postgraduates with ongoing written drafts and AW needs, agreed to participate in a writing tutoring session and follow-up interview. The participants signed a consent form. The survey asked about general needs in language, such as grammar and vocabulary. The participants were five females at a Mexican university whose programs required postgraduates to publish an article in a scientific journal in order to graduate, and/or to present research (e.g., masters’ studies) at professional conferences.

The five participants self-reported a good writing ability in English, but expressed low confidence when writing in English. All five participants had published research in English, and three had earned a certificate in English fluency, such as International English Language Testing System (IELTS) and First Certificate of English (FCE), and a local certificate at the lead author’s institution. The five participants viewed their English competency as intermediate or advanced, and rated reading as their strongest ability. Three of the five participants were midway through their Ph.D. degree, one more had completed a Masters, whereas one pharmaceutical and biological chemistry writer was completing her bachelor’s degree. This BA participant was encouraged by a congress advertised at the odontology postgraduate program’s facilities (the place where their research was conducted) to publish research. Consequently, she played the role of a research-conference speaker, a role postgraduate-students more commonly play. The five participants expressed a lack of formal training in research writing as postgraduates. One had taken a reading class, and most believed that their development as research writers was due to reading. Table 1 shows participants’ discipline, research genres, and the length of their drafts.

Note: All participants’ names are pseudonyms chosen by the participants.

Table 1: Study participants

Tutors

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were no available peer tutors at Acatlán during the initial stage of this AW research so the researcher asked an AW expert to award some surveyed respondents a 60-minute one-to-one writing tutoring session in English on Zoom in July-September, 2020. The researcher and tutor had met while they were involved in a mentoring program offered by the International Writing Center Association (IWCA). The writing expert recruited two more writing tutors from their institution in the United States, and all three volunteered to participate in the research. Two tutors were academics studying for a MA degree, and one had completed a Ph.D. The three postgraduate tutors were from the Humanities and had knowledge of AW and literature studies from American universities. The three tutors had educational training in writing tutoring from their university, experience as writing tutors, and one had experience directing a writing center. The tutors were native speakers of English, one reported to also speak some German, whereas another to spoke fluent Haitian Creole and knew some French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Mandarin. All three had experience teaching English in both university and professional settings. These tutors also signed a consent form.

Note: All participants’ names are pseudonyms chosen by the participants.

Table 2: Tutoring pairs

Data collection

Tutoring sessions

Data was collected through five videorecorded tutoring sessions in English for later analysis (Barron & Engle, 2007).The main researcher played a passive participation role (Hernández -Sampieri & Mendoza Torres, 2018) with the camera and microphone off. However, during JossJ’s tutoring, the researcher helped by translating the tutor’s questions into Spanish, and JossJ’s (whose listening and speaking abilities inhibited communication) answers into English so the tutoring continued to flow. To avoid bias in the analysis of JossJ, only data from her draft and data in which she talked about the tutoring session during the follow-up interview were used.

Interviews

Based on Hernández-Sampieri and Mendoza Torres (2018), the qualitative interview included an anecdotic feature, involving open questions to obtain views, experiences, and/or detailed opinions from participants’ voice and language. The qualitative interview was flexible because its beginning and end were not predetermined. Thus, interviews were conducted to elicit the L2 writer’s detailed views about their research writing in English and the tutoring session. Flexible interviews (see Appendix 1) were conducted in Spanish after the tutoring session and videorecorded on Zoomfor later analysis.

In general, tutoring sessions lasted between 30-60 minutes and interviews between 15-40 minutes. All tutoring sessions and interviews were transcribed verbatim in Word and analyzed in Excel.

Data analysis

Yin (2009; 2014) holds that to have more reliable findings, a cross-case synthesis is adequate. Thus, each writer’s tutoring data and each interview were analyzed individually. The data from each participant within a specific discipline were compared. Then two writers’ data from Humanities and Social Sciences fields were synthesized and compared to the three writers’ data from the experimental sciences.

Tutoring and interview data were transcribed, and in the case of interviews in Spanish, translated into English. The researchers read the data in context (Englander, 2006b) where AW needs or concerns occurred and manually coded it in Excel, aiming to conciliate diverse interpretations in a systematic and dynamic way. After several passes on the data to agree upon common themes (Silver & Lewins, 2014), the researchers coded instances in which AW needs or concerns (e.g., linguistic, structural) were addressed by writers and tutors, and categorized these deductively as HOCs and LOCs. Recurrent concerns included those about flow, structure, methodological approach, punctuation, sentence, and/or spelling. To report more reliable results, we triangulated the data, examining where we found similarities between tutors’ concerns about writers and concerns from L2 writers themselves.

Then the researchers inductively coded for the communicative function of the participants’ negotiation skills, e.g., explanation, question (see Table 3). Geisler & Swarts (2019) indicate that as language is complex, coders cannot avoid using interpretative judgement, or intuiting language function and meaning when coding. Thus, our coding process was dynamic and interpretative, as we sought to find gaps between tutors’ and writers’ perceptions of their challenges. When we recognized an issue in coding, we analyzed our own responses to the data, negotiated the nature of the conflict, and solved it through consensus. Following these practices, interrater reliability was 98% between the two coders.

Note: Negotiation skills are defined by the study researchers.

Table 3: Negotiation skills code definitions

Findings

What higher and lower order concerns do L2 postgraduate writers reveal in online writing tutorials on their research articles’ introductions and abstracts in draft forms for publication?

The analysis showed that L2 writers’ typical concerns were at a discourse level (i.e., HOCs). Based on tutoring data, Table 4 shows that with the Humanities and Social Sciences’ L2 writers, LOCs were scarcely addressed by their corresponding tutors. However, with the Experimental Sciences’ L2 writers, both HOCs and LOCs were similar in occurrences as addressed by corresponding tutors.

Note: JossJs’ data examples were taken from the interview instances in which JossJ recalled Rebecca’s words.

Table 4: L2 writers’ higher and lower order concerns identified in tutors’ data

The tutors’ focus turned from HOCs to LOCs when meaning needed clarifying, similar to the findings of Craig (2016). This change of focus happened despite the fact that Experimental Sciences writers expressed more HOCs than LOCs, indicating that tutors were the main source of shifting the discussion from HOCs to LOCs instead of writers, as is commonly assumed. For example, the tutor James focused on Experimental Sciences writers’ HOCs and balanced the session with some LOCs including vocabulary, grammar (nouns, verbs, adverbs) and punctuation (commas, semicolons) as soon as his understanding was hindered. For example, when James read the word “fate” in Teresa’s paper, he was confused because “fate” for him was related to “faith” and/or “human destiny” rather than “density” as Teresa meant it.

Likewise, based on the tutoring session data, Table 5 shows that some writers’ HOCs identified across disciplines were (1) managing lots of information, (2) organizing the texts, (3) connecting different sources (intertextuality), and (4) including relevant or deleting irrelevant information. Moreover, although writers across fields did not address many LOCs, they converged in concerns on word meaning, sentence length, and insufficient vocabulary to express ideas.

Note: JossJs’ data examples were taken from the interview.

Table 5: L2 writers’ higher and lower order concerns

L2 writers consistently expressed HOCs with the research writing, and they engaged tutors with questions about structure, organization, content, and reference to other scholarly works or concepts in their field. For example, Mariana was concerned whether the organization of her methodology sounded right and clear. Lena was concerned about how to approach a theoretical work and connect different sources.

Even when L2 writers addressed LOCs, they rarely specified a sentence or construction that concerned them. Instead, they generalized about experiences with that LOC. For example, Teresa observed that the research documents in her field had a great deal of technical words (e.g., Drosha, pri-miRNA), which she also included in her text. This type of words made her writing difficult to understand as she assumed readers knew the meanings. Seoklaur tended to notice words when reading and to think about how to use them in her article.

HOCs and LOCs indicated the departure point to negotiate the L2 learners’ AW regarding articles and abstracts. However, the study sought further information about the interaction between tutors and L2 writers regarding articles’ introductions and abstracts in draft forms, and the ways writers accepted or neglected tutors’ feedback.

How do L2 postgraduate writers at a Mexican university negotiate academic writing regarding their research article’s introduction and abstracts in draft forms for publication with writing tutors?

The contextual inductive analysis showed very little variety of communicative functional skills. Table 6 shows that during the tutoring, most of the L2 writers rarely asked or argued, frequently agreed or explained, and to a lower extent answered and expressed concerns about their research.

Note: JossJs’ tutoring session presented technical issues while recording, so it was not considered.

Table 6: Negotiation skills for each L2 writer and discipline

Explaining seemed to have played a significant role during the negotiation across L2 writers. Humanities and Social Science writers showed a greater number of explanations (42) than Experimental Science writers (23). For example, Lena explained how a property such as the category of given names emerged from the interaction of different related factors using a complex system theory that came from physics and maths.

Likewise, agreements played a significant role. Agreements with the tutor over-predominated in Experimental Science writers (142) as opposed to the Humanities and Social Science writers (15). For example, as Teresa had expressed concern regarding flow, she agreed-“All right”-with the tutor when he explained that part of flow was introducing the idea to people so they understood what was coming.

In tutoring, the five L2 writers expressed concerns (24) about their research drafts although in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the number was lower (8) than in the Experimental Sciences (16). To illustrate, Lena was concerned because perhaps she could not achieve her goal, i.e., to shift the way names could be categorized from an interdisciplinary approach or understood as a complex phenomenon, and for her this goal was difficult and ambitious. Teresa was concerned because as a Ph.D. student, she read a lot of literature, but to write it in a fluent and organize way was a concern for her. She had written general information without guiding (using signposting) the reader and suddenly she had emphasized a point that to her was the core of the study.

Arguments scarcely happened and only in the Experimental Sciences sessions. For instance, Seoklaur argued that in papers it is irrelevant for the scientific community to ask questions such as “Did you know that flavonoids would be beneficial for health care?”

Asking questions hardly occurred in both sets of writers. For example, Seoklaur asked the tutor whether descriptions (contextualizing or writing about the state of the art to then be focused on a single point) of previous studies had to be allocated in the introduction. Mariana asked “Which one?” in response to a question about a song Mariana had used in her study and that the tutor said they recognized.

Mariana and Lena seemed to have adopted an active role (giving longer responses) with tutors rather than playing the passive role of a learner (receiving input and giving yes/no short responses) as Seoklaur, Teresa, and JossJ from Experimental Sciences did. The Humanities and Social Science writers explained more and agreed fewer times than the Experimental Sciences writers, who agreed with the tutor, articulated short answers, and expressed HOCs about their target research drafts. Indeed, JossJ (the writer the researcher tried to help understand the tutor’s questions) was unable to negotiate the paper structure or resolve her concerns and did not talk much and/or question the tutor.

In general, a limited range of negotiation skills occurred (e.g., explaining, agreeing, answering, and expressing concern). The writers tended to agree with the tutors’ feedback about the research papers’ structure (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, i.e., IMRAD), and L2 writers rarely argued, justified, or asked. Moreover, postgraduate writers like Mariana and Lena negotiated tutorial sessions on research documents and were more orally active with tutors that also shared the writers’ humanities field and teaching occupation. When they were in situations in which they needed to explain their research, they often took on a more orally active role in the discussion. Although all writers expressed satisfaction with their tutorials, even the experimental science participants playing a passive role as a learner, postgraduate L2 writers seemed most engaged in tutorials where they negotiated both the content of the tutoring session and HOCs and LOCs regarding the structure of their research article’s drafted sections.

Discussion

What higher and lower order concerns do L2 postgraduate writers reveal in online writing tutorials on their research articles’ introductions and abstracts in draft forms for publication?

Higher order concerns

Like Buckingham (2014), Corcoran & Englander (2016), Cheatle (2017), and Martín et al. (2014), L2 writers in contexts in which English is used as a foreign language faced many writing concerns at a discourse level. The predominance of HOCs addressed by tutors and writers suggests that the common tutoring approach used in a typical writing center that focuses more on organization and content, rather than on linguistic issues, as reported by Harris & Silva (1993) and Severino (2004), also happened in the Humanities and Social Science writers in this Mexican context.

The predominance of HOCs (e.g., organizing the text, genre macro-structure) expressed by the writers across fields in the tutoring seemed to show gaps in the tacit acquisition of writing and genre (macro-structure) knowledge, which suggests that transfer from L2 reading to L2 writing is not as straightforward as Eisterhold (1990) showed. For example, Seoklaur expressed to having learned a lot about academic language from reading and presenting similar chemistry research papers in English to her classmates in the laboratory where she was doing her research, but she was still concerned about whether opinions and questions were accepted in scientific prose.

In the Humanities and Social Sciences, Mariana and Lena were still in need of developing their research papers’ structure during the tutoring negotiation. Mariana and Lena seemed unaware that the required and dominant IMRADstructure can be partially modified or substituted by a straightforward narrative (i.e., a research genre) in research approaches like autoethnography in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies as Canagarajah (2016) stated. As Pérez-Llantada (2012) acknowledged, Mariana and Lena needed to know that in history, anthropology, cultural studies, theoretical linguistics or literature, the argumentative essay (introduction, body, conclusion) is used although this essay has not received as much attention as the prototypical IMRAD research paper organization has in empirical research. Mariana and Lena seemed not at all aware of non-empirical studies (e.g., review of articles), which generally do not follow an IMRAD structure (Swales & Feak, 2009). As said earlier, HOCs and LOCs articulated by tutors concerning L2 writers and L2 writers themselves were a starting point for us to answer:

How do L2 postgraduate writers at a Mexican university negotiate academic writing regarding their research article’s introduction and abstracts in draft forms for publication with writing tutors?

The writers tended to use skills of agreement, explanation, and answering as opposed to argumentation in the Humanities and Social Sciences and in the Experimental Sciences. Agreement frequently occurred in the five writers; explanations happened more in the Humanities and Social Science writers as opposed to short yes/no answers in the Experimental Science writers.

Explaining and answering

Writers in the Humanities and Social Sciences were more communicatively active by explaining the tutor’s open questions, which were focused on HOCs. These types of thoughtful questions allowed the L2 writers to reflect and do most of the work rather than expecting tutors to fix or edit their papers as tutoring theory suggests (Thonus, 1999a). Conversely, the Experimental Science writers were less communicative orally, and predominantly engaged in listening to “how to approach an issue or solve a problem,” (Thonus, 1999a, p. 227) and answering “yes”, “OK”, “all right”, “right”, “aham”, “yeah” (Hayward, 2004). They relied on listening to the American tutors without challenging the educational authority as noted by Healy & Bosher (as cited by Thonus, 2004). According to interactional behaviour dominance (Linell et al. as cited by Thonus 1999a), in terms of time at talk, utterance length (Bilous & Krauss as cited by Thonus, 1999a), these L2 science writers seemed to accept the tutors’ direction or control of the texts alongside the negotiation by simply agreeing and/or providing short answers.

In other words, the Experimental Science writers agreed with most of the tutor’s feedback as Thonus (2002) also found, which is common when giving advice (Tsai, 2017) in a subordinated tutoring process, i.e., accepting without arguing with tutors about the feedback received (Molina Natera, 2017b). This phenomenon also occurs in educational contexts in which English is used as a foreign language, where learners often see teachers as knowledgeable models whose discourse predominates over learners’ (Cazden as cited by Molina Natera, 2012) and/or are seen as authorities (Blau & Hall, 2002; Thonus, 1999b;1999c; 2004; Williams, 2004; Young, 1992).

Arguing and agreeing

A notable barely-used skill in the two disciplines was argumentation; instead, the writers agreed with tutors’ feedback. They did not exchange critical reactions, or oral reactions to defend their points with the aim of solving a difference, probably because they did not disagree (Molina, 2017b, Van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2002; Vicuña & Marinkovich, 2008).

The postgraduate L2 writers in this study showed a few similar skills used and scarce argumentation when negotiating AW. It might be that participants such as JossJ could not express orally her thoughts due to weak listening skills, so the thoughts stayed just in her mind. In sciences such as biology, Teresa said that supervisors’ focus is on clear descriptions of results. This suggests that students are less used to arguing and discussing, which seem to be secondary skills as opposed to emphasizing clear descriptions of methods and results. This might be because according to Swales & Feak (2009) greater discussions might mean weak methods and results in life sciences. 

Conclusions and Implications

In conclusion, participants addressed more HOCs than LOCs in their drafts of research articles for publication. The writing participants often agreed with the tutors’ feedback about target writing concerns, and demonstrated some negotiation skills, especially those in the social and humanities sciences.

Therefore, to manage HOCs and LOCs, the institution should plan courses for professors to play the role of writing tutors, as tutors (literacy brokers) could be an alternative strategy for L2 writers to learn to manage concerns as suggested by Lillis & Curry (2010). The findings indicate the need for training the tutors who not only address linguistic concerns, but who need to explain HOCs related to macro structure of research papers, who ask students to practice these structures, and who encourage students to revise them collaboratively, in pairs or groups. It would be useful to train L2 writers across disciplines to move forward from listening to and agreeing with tutors and/or describing results to using diverse communicative oral skills, especially in argumentation because according to Molina (2017b), argumentation is considered the basis through which the conversation or pedagogical speech in tutoring occurs.

These L2 writers seemed to benefit from tutors’ feedback and student-centered methodologies envisaged in tutoring, a social practice involving tutors as literacy brokers, which is different from the traditional ones (learning as a whole class with teachers conducting the learning) often used in the classroom (Calle Arango et al., 2017). However, negotiation skills were limited. Thus, institutions should look for and implement diverse strategies to prepare tutors so that L2 research writers can take advantage of the tutoring as they engage with tutors. This can be through practicing negotiation skills with communicative functions such as arguing, explaining, and justifying writing choices in structuring research rather than simply agreeing with tutors using short yes/no answers.

Students need to know what tutoring means, what it is expected from them as writing negotiators, and both students and professors playing the role of tutors in the foreign context need to know how tutoring and negotiation might unfold in real life.

The institution should train professors across disciplines to play the role of writing tutors to reinforce the students’ English language learning skills while offering a battery of negotiation strategies (discuss/argue, and explain orally the points about the reading or explain to them in written prose) that can be used during and after reading scientific papers.

One limitation of the study was the small sample size of five female L2 writers with similar educational goals (e.g., publishing research in English). Further research with male and female participants and more tutoring sessions would be desirable to further understand the way L2 writers negotiate academic writing texts. The study did not ignore the tutors, but it did not focus on their priorities for the tutoring session; instead, we focused on the challenges faced by the L2 writers and how they navigated the tutoring session.

Regardless of its limitations, the study contributes to knowledge by revealing how L2 writers negotiated with tutors the writing of research articles, including the linguistic and rhetorical features of introductions and abstracts. We also presented the L2 writers’ concerns about writing research papers, contributing empirical research about social practices involving literacy brokering. Besides, the study can be a source of useful information for further research and pedagogy in contexts around the world where English is used as a common language, and where AW in English, tutoring, and collaborative practices are areas still developing or in need of greater attention.

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^[1] Facultad is the equivalent of a department, school, or college in North America.