Tutoring Reflection

My first solo tutoring appointment was an ESL student whose primary language is Spanish. Her assignment was a book review for an advertising class where she had to connect various ideas presented in the book she was assigned with ideas she discussed in her class. She spent the first few minutes of the appointment explaining her assignment and stating that she was an ESL student. She mainly wanted me to look over her grammar in her assignment and showed me that she already had the first half of her assignment proofread by another tutor. I went ahead and started on the half she didn't get proofread and told her that I'll go back and look at the first half if time allowed for it. First thing I looked out for was to make sure her grammar really was an issue, and that her problem wasn't something else. After looking at the first few sentences and the number of grammar mistakes within, I realized that grammar was indeed an issue. I went ahead and marked her mistakes in the paper, explaining to her why they are mistakes and what she would need to do to fix them. Aside from spelling mistakes and odd word choices in some areas, another issue she had with grammar was the word order for some sentences. I went ahead and made note of those mistakes as well and gave her suggestions for revision on those particular sentences. As I was going through her paper, the student kept making comments on how hard it is to write in english. I assured her that while there were mistakes, her writing was still pretty coherent, and would just need to keep a few grammar rules in mind for future writing. After looking over the second half of the assignment, I went ahead and took a look at the part that was already proofread. I saw that the previous tutor had already pointed out all the mistakes. After that, the student thanked me and left.

My second appointment was a freshman who was working on her first draft of an ENC1101 paper. She explained to me that her assignment required her to pick three different advertisements and find common themes throughout those assignments. She also told me that the paper needed to be 2100 words, and that she was having trouble just reaching 1000 words as her current draft was just over 900. She even brought in pictures of the ads that she was writing about. The ads were all different Gucci advertisements, and she wanted to talk about themes of gender roles displayed within all the ads. After all was explained to me, I went ahead and took a look at her draft. One thing I noticed while reading it was that she would spend only one paragraph talking about each ad. She brought up some interesting ideas pertaining to each within each paragraph, so I told her that she can easily expand her paper by expanding on those various ideas and making them there own paragraph. I went ahead and made notes in her paper and underlined the ideas that she can expand upon. From her writing, I could also tell that the student was still relatively new to the concept of formal writing, from her use of contractions, slang terms, and personal pronouns. I asked her if she was aware of what formal writing is, and the student told me that she never heard of it before. I explained to her how academic writing is different from other forms of writing she may have been used to, and made notes in her draft where things needed to be changed in order to meet academic standards. After that, she told me that she came to the RWC because her instructor offered extra credit for doing so. She asked me if I could sign and date the bottom of her draft as proof. I signed her draft, wished her luck with the rest of her paper, and the session ended.