Developing a writing centre and nurturing a community of learners to support students with diverse backgrounds

In 2021, a pilot project was launched to develop a writing center for an English Language Centre at an English-medium Hong Kong university. A peer mentoring model was adopted to help undergraduate students receive additional support regarding discipline-specific content, genre, structure and language while developing their general process writing skills. During the development of the model, the project drew upon literature on online writing support (Gherwash & Paiz, 2020, Severino & Prim, 2016, Tan, 2011, Thompson, 2014, & Weirick et al., 2017), community of learners (Akella, 2012, Moser et al., 2015, & Schoonheim‐Klein et al., 2012), and genre-based writing feedback (Kuiper et al., 2017, Munje et al., 2018, & Yu, 2021). Peer mentors were recruited from multiple departments, trained and assigned to mentees from related majors. The writing centre was initially run online through the Microsoft Teams platform while our university shifted from online-only classes to hybrid classes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Eventually, the writing centre began to provide both online and face-to-face sessions. Research was conducted during the 2023-2024 academic year. During each writing centre session, post-session reports from mentors and post-session reflections from mentees were collected. At the end of each semester, an online post-semester survey was sent to mentees and focus group interviews of both mentors and mentees were conducted. Each peer mentor was expected to submit one audio or video recording of their sessions. Initial findings have provided insights into how to best revise our model, develop training packages and support for mentors, enhance the quality of mentor feedback practices, and foster an equitable environment for the community of learners. This project is relevant to the conference theme as we are pursuing a sustainable way to provide alternative opportunities and additional support for students with diverse backgrounds including local Hong Kong, mainland Chinese and international students.