Post for 2/13

Bedford Guide
One of the things I was nervous about in beginning tutoring was how to shift my tutoring strategies for different students. I knew that an adult learned would need different kinds of help from a freshman struggling with the demands of a rhetoric class, but I wasn’t sure exactly how to cater to each situation. The Bedford Guide gives some helpful hints on how to handle different scenarios, but at the end of the day, patience and listening seems necessary for all situations. I also was glad to see that some strategies, like planning with the student for future sessions and summarizing what we want to accomplish, are effective with all kinds of students. It’s certainly helpful to read about the different sentence constructions in other languages, and to be reminded that second language learners might not be used to including verbs in every sentence. Then again, my native-speaking freshman student also did not know that all sentences should have a verb. So, the strategies are proving useful for many different kinds of students.

Talk About Writing
I found that the example at the beginning of chapter nine—where the tutor used three pumping questions with a student instead of using one pumping question and then transitioning to cognitive scaffolding or instruction—was very useful. It would be helpful for me as a tutor if UI’s Writing Center could one day provide this kind of feedback and analysis for some of my tutoring sessions. Since I am rarely categorizing the types of comments or statements I make during a session, it’s hard to know when I might be using too many questions when moving on to instruction might be a more efficient and effective way to handle the problem.

            I was also interested to read that the jury is still out on whether having the student read his or her paper aloud is better or whether having the tutor read it aloud is more beneficial. I’ve found recently that I am better able to provide useful feedback and questions if I read the student’s paper, since I actually have trouble digesting what is going on in a paragraph unless I’m physically speaking the words—so I imagine there are some students for whom reading aloud is better for them, while others cannot concentrate on the big picture and the words at the same time.

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