Writing Conferences in a Second Language Writing Classroom: Instructor and Student Perspectives

Abstract

Teacher–student writing conferences are considered a valuable teaching method in composition courses, used mostly with the purpose of discussing students’ progress in their writing. This article presents an exploratory study on student and instructor expectations and perceptions of writing conferences in a semester‐long writing course for multilingual students. The sample consists of 100 students who were enrolled in this course and eight instructors who were teaching it. The course examined here was designed to offer one lecture and one writing conference per week to each student, resulting in two writing conferences for each of the five writing tasks. The factors examined are teacher preparation time and strategy, format (individual and group writing conferences), length, frequency, topics discussed, and overall satisfaction. The authors collected data through extensive surveys that included Likert‐type scales, item ranking, and open‐ended questions. The results show that the students and their instructors regarded individual conferences of 10 minutes to be more effective than longer group conferences; however, participants voiced weaknesses of both types of conferences. The results and implications inform writing instructors and administrators about possible uses of such a course design and potential improvements for the use of writing conferences in second language writing courses.