This study investigates how ‘tutee resistance’ works as a part of negotiation between writing tutors and tutees by comparing two Korean EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students. So far, the resistance that tutees have shown during writing tutorials has been considered as a dispreferred practice in the framework of conversational analysis (Waring, 2005). However, this study adopts a sociocultural view that negotiation is key to tutor-tutee interactions and that it starts when there occurs a conflict between them (Cho & Kim, 2014; Morley & Stephenson, 2015; Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976). By taking into account the students’ written products as well as their interactions with their tutors during writing tutorials, this study aims to explore ‘student resistance’ of two Korean EFL students in the whole process of their completing a writing project. The comparison of the two students suggested that the tutee who was seemingly more resistant was as likely as their less resistant counterpart to actually incorporate the tutor feedback. Such a result implies that a tutee’s resistance towards tutor feedback may not be necessarily negative; rather, it can be considered as a process of negotiation between the tutor and tutee. And thus by being
aware of this possibility, tutors should be trained on how to cope with tutees’ various ways of negotiation in the tutorials.