Tutor-student interaction: how advice is requested, offered, and responded to in an online consultation.

Abstract

In many university courses, tutors and students engage in online consultations for tutors providing students with academic support. Part of a tutor’s responsibility in such an interaction is to give the student academic advice. Previous studies have been done on how students accept or resist advice in in-person interactions, but the online tutor-student consultation has not been investigated. I focus on advice giving and explore how advice is requested, offered, and responded to in an online tutor-student consultation using an ethnomethodologically informed conversation analytic approach. To do this, I examine a single 27-minute audio recording of an online tutor-student consultation. The session was voluntarily recorded on the online meeting platform and both the tutor and student consented to sharing it with me. Through a tutor-led interrogative sequence, the tutor builds a common ground and establishes an epistemic equilibrium where both tutor and student are knowledgeable about the student’s experiences. Thereafter, the student may issue a troubles telling that shifts the epistemic gradient so that the tutor is in a more knowledgeable position and able to offer advice regarding the trouble. I also investigate an instance where the student does not issue a troubleshooting, and the tutor does not offer advice. My findings align with the recommendations by a previous study that advice-giving can be evaluative: as the tutor only advised after the student had shared their thoughts and knowledge about the topic to determine if there was a need for advice. The findings contribute to the literature on advice sequences in institutional settings by reinforcing prior findings and demonstrating how the tutor used a series of techniques to build common ground and epistemic equilibrium and how the student used a troubles telling to shift the epistemic gradient so the tutor could move into a more knowledgeable position necessary for giving advice. While there has been limited research conducted on advice-giving in face-to-face T-S interactions to my knowledge, there has been no investigation of how advice is accomplished in online T-S consultations to highlight the originality of the current study.