ABSTRACT. This article investigates tutor dominance in academic
writing tutorials within the framework of institutional discourse.
Tutor gender and tutee gender and language proficiency, as well as
the interaction of the three, are considered as exponents of
interactant dominance. Pragmatic measures of tutor dominance
selected are frequency of directives, directive type, and mitigation
strategies. Analysis indicates that these features of tutors' speech
remain relatively constant in interactions with male and female
tutees or with native and nonnative speakers of English. These
results suggest that institutional context outweighs gender and
language proficiency in the definition of participant roles and the
sanctioning of tutor dominance behaviors.