Carol Severino

Professor
Director of the Writing Center
Biography

Carol directs the Writing Center and the Writing Fellows Program and teaches courses that explore the relationships between writing, language background, culture, and pedagogy, also the focus of her research. She teaches both tutor preparation seminars: Teaching in a Writing Center (for graduate students preparing to tutor in the Writing Center) and Writing Theory and Practice (for new Writing Fellows; taught with Megan Knight). She teaches Topics in Second Language Acquisition: Writing for the FLARE Program as well as travel writing for the Honors First Year Seminar Program. She also tutors in the Writing Center every semester and conducts a writing center practicum for Linguistics TESOL students preparing to tutor and tutoring in the Writing Center.

Carol was a Collegiate Teaching Award winner in 2003 and a Fulbright Scholar in Ecuador in 2008, and has served twice as an English Language Specialist for the US State Department in Honduras. Recently, she has given workshops and presentations in Mexico and Ecuador, as well as at the Universities of Wisconsin and Mississippi. In 2015, she keynoted the Latin American Writing Programs and Writing Centers Conference in Colombia (by Skype) and the Southern Illinois Writing Centers Consortium Conference. She has written essays about teaching writing in Ecuador and about learning creative writing in Spanish in Writing on the Edge and a recent travel essay about Ecuadorian bus trips that appeared in the International Journal of Travel and Travelling Cultures in 2018. Her travel essay “Engagement Ceremony” appeared in The Best Travel Writing 2012 (Travelers’ Tales)

Carol serves on the editorial board of Journal of Second Language Writing and reviews for many other writing studies journals.  Her writing center research study with Shih-Ni Sun Prim on word-choice errors in Chinese writers’ ESL writing and tutors’ online responses to them was published in the Fall 2015 issue of Writing Center Journal. Their recent article “Second Language Writing Development and the Role of Tutors” appeared in Fall 2017 issue of the same journal. An essay theorizing about her own and other teachers’ second language learning experiences in light of the perceived conflict between translingualism and second language writing appeared in the Fall, 2017 issue of Composition Studies.  An essay she wrote about tutoring first-grade writing compared to tutoring college writing was published in the Sept/Oct 2018 issue of WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship.  With Prim and Deirdre Egan, she wrote up a study of second language writing development based on a survey study they conducted in the Writing Center, now forthcoming in the Fall 2020 issue of Writing Center Journal.

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Portrait of Carol Severino
Phone
Education
PhD, University of Illinois at Chicago
Contact Information
Address

University of Iowa
168 English Philosophy Building (EPB)
251 West Iowa Avenue
Iowa City, IA 52242
United States