“I’m Bad at Grammar”: Self-Deprecation in Undergraduate Peer Tutoring

This study explores how one tutor treats self-deprecatory assessments offered by tutees during peer tutoring sessions in an undergraduate writing center. Video-recorded data of two hour-long tutoring sessions were collected at the writing center of a major university in New York City and analyzed using the framework of conversation analysis. The data reveal that the tutor orients to tutee self-deprecations differently depending on the phase of the tutoring session. That is, during the diagnostic phase of the tutoring sessions, the tutor acknowledges and often disagrees with self-deprecations. However, during the directive phase, the tutor ignores or sequentially deletes self-deprecations by initiating a new adjacency pair. The contribution of institutionality to these findings will be discussed.