Blog Post #3 (Conor Hilton)

 Tutoring all students should be tailored to the individual student’s needs and concerns, and work towards improving the writing of the specific piece of writing that you’re working with and the writing of the student more broadly. This tutoring will take a variety of forms and approaches, including discussion, note-taking, and otherwise visually engaging with the text.

 

I imagine that tutoring non-native speakers of English can involve more attention paid to odd grammatical structures and difficulties with vocabulary and grammar more generally. This attention will likely also assume less familiarity than that of a native English speaker. You may also need to check for comprehension more thoroughly than you would with a native English speaker. I tutored a non-native speaker of English earlier today, and I wish that I had done more to check for comprehension (though I’m not sure quite what to do—we had a decent dialogue back and forth, but I worry that the student largely parroted my own words back, which is actually a concern I have about working with all my students, whether they are native English speakers or not).


It seems important to ground the tutoring in specifics, and especially the specific piece of writing at hand, whenever possible. This seems valuable for all students, but is likely more necessary with non-native English speakers because of larger gaps between spoken and written English.

Comments

  1. Dylan NiceSeptember 14, 2020 at 4:38 PM

    Hi Conor,
    I share your uncertainty about the best ways to check for comprehension. I rely on asking the student if they understand/have any questions and often they say yes, perhaps out of politeness or embarrassment. I have found that ESL students are usually very comfortable acknowledging when they are unfamiliar with a particular word, but are more likely to stay mum when a concept confuses them, similar to native speaking students.

    Perhaps, like some of the observations made about Fan in Carol's paper, this is a matter of pride/face.

    ReplyDelete

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