To examine the potential role of teacher-student interactions in the teaching and learning of written language, a study analyzed the writing conference interaction between a teacher and four separate college students: one high achieving Caucasian, one high achieving Asian American, one low achieving Caucasian, and one low achieving Asian American. The Asian American students were native English speakers whose parents spoke an Asian language. Everything the students wrote was collected, including all drafts of their papers and all their notes, and all their conferences (a minimum of four across the semester) were tape recorded. Also collected were three investigator-student interviews about the student's at-home composing process. Transcripts were examined for topics of conversation and idea units. Findings indicated that (1) the different students wanted to focus on different types of topics (discourse level topics for the two Caucasians and surface level for the high achieving Asian American; the lowest achieving student had no hierarchy of intellectual topics); (2) the teacher focused on different types of intellectual topics for the different students (discourse level topics for all except the lowest achieving Asian American student); (3) the teacher gave more praise to the higher achieving students who seemed to elicit that praise by expressing their insecurity about their writing; (4) the lower achieving students initiated topics likely to alienate a teacher; and (5) the synchrony of the conversation broke down with the lowest achieving Asian American student, who inserted backchannel signals at inappropriate times in the conversation. (HOD)