Ferreira: Concurrent Cues of Communication: Japanese Students’ Use of Verbal and Visual Signposts during Writing Tutorials 20 | Tokyo JALT Journal Concurrent Cues of Communication: Japanese Students’ Use of Verbal and Visual Signposts during Writing Tutorials Dan Ferreira International Christian University Abstract This case study reports on the language socialization and written performance of two first-year Japanese students at a liberal arts college in Tokyo. With a focus on the s tudents’ learning experiences, this research triangulated the analysis of transcripts and interviews, field notes, and observations to explore how students from a 450-550 TOEFL cohort engaged in academic writing tutorials with their teacher. A report on the students’ use of short discourse markers, language display (e.g. gestures, facial expressions), and the use of external aids (e.g. manipulating a mouse pointer, writing notes) reveals a process where the end result is greater than the sum of its parts. That is, how students communicate what they retain at the time of the tutorial experience may not be as self-evident compared to the follow-up writing drafts. Through the implementation of verbal and non-verbal cues during student-teacher tutorials, the students were able to improve their writing skills. Introduction This research explores how first-year Japanese university students negotiate meaning throughout student-teacher writing tutorials in English with a teacher who is a native speaker of English at a private international Japanese university. This study combines Young and Miller’s (2004) interactional competence framework with qualitative methods of observation, interview, and analysis of artifacts (such as drafts of essays and observer’s field not es) for the purpose of understanding the dynamics of that learning arrangement. According to Young and Miller (2004), interactional competence “is defined as participants’ knowledge of how to configure...resources (such as verbal and nonverbal communication cues) in a specific practice” (p. 520). To communicate writing needs to the instructor successfully, it is necessary that the student has acquired an interactional competence that is different from the classroom experience where the learner is not expected to verbal and nonverbal communication specific to the teacher- student tutorial conference. The aim of tutorial sessions is for students to manipulate a combination of talk and other resources to achieve desired revisions throughout the academic writing process. However, for students with a limited ability to produce spoken academic language, especially in the face-to- face student-teacher tutorial EFL setting, the pragmatic use of communication cues, such as gestures and sounds of confirmation or rejection, can be instrumental in the co-construction of meaning with the teacher (House, 2013). The language of display, such as pointing, is a skill that complements interactional competence (Leander & Prior, 2004). Communication cues serve as effective signposts that help the teacher to adjust the flow of the tutorial, which leads to successful uptake for the student (Gilliland, 2014).