Teacher Response as Conversation: More Than Casual Talk, an Exploration

It has become a commonplace in scholarship on teacher response: viewing comments as a dialogue between teacher and student, an ongoing discussion between the teacher reader and the student writer, a conversation. Erika Lindemann advises teachers to make comments that "create a kind of dialogue" between teacher and student and "keep the lines of communication open" (216). Chris Anson encourages teachers to write comments that are "more casual than formal, as if rhetorically sitting next to the writer, collaborating, suggesting,