A study was undertaken to discover clues to the learning processes of college students by exploring a method for locating and analyzing student initiated concerns about writing in student/teacher writing conferences. Four tapes of teacher conferences with two students from the first and last of a semester were analyzed in depth. It was noted that the students seemed to have two major concerns that they repeated over and over again during the conference and that these concerns seemed to change as the semester progressed. During the first conference the student with stronger verbal ability issued more invitations to discuss strategy and the student with weaker verbal ability issued more invitations asking for information. The preliminary hypothesis was that students must have what they consider to be a comfortable level of control over linguistic conventions before they can begin to think about basic strategies. During the final conference of the semester, the pattern of seeking information or strategies reversed itself. The weaker student, approaching the level of the stronger student at the beginning of the semester, asked about strategies, and the stronger student asked for more advanced information about the finer points of style, showing a progression in the learning process. (MKM)