Issues in Applied Linguistics

This paper explores ways in which expert and novice roles are constituted and maintained in an academic counseling encounter. By characterizing the counseling meeting as a socializing, problem-solving event and using both functional linguistics and discourse analysis as our methodological tools, we describe how the counselor' and the student mark stance through linguistic choices such as polarity, modality, superlatives, and reported speech. We also argue that the practice of withholding is an important means for both participants to create a zone of proximal development for whoever of them is the less expertized and that such a practice plays an important role in the power dynamics of the academic counseling encounter.