ENG250 FA2018 Course Blog

Field Report #2: Pre-Tutoring Questions: 1. How often were awkward silences present? 2. Who spoke more, the student or the tutor? 3. Did the student seem more confident at the end of the lesson? Observation Report: The tutor began the session by asking the student the open-ended question: "What can I help you with?". The student presented the assignment and the tutor proceeded to review both the assignment and the student's writing. The tutor read the the student's writing aloud and the tutor and student discussed and refined the student's hypothesis. The tutor asked the student what other concerns they would to address. The tutor and student then reviewed the student's sources and discussed how to analyze the articles rather than simply summarizing them. The tutor and the student then discussed the deeper points of the student's paper and how the structure of the paper should be refined further. The tutor then mentioned than the student was free ...

Field Report #1: Pre-Tutoring Questions: 1. How often were awkward silences present? 2. Were they any things that the tutor did not know how to address (unfamiliar subjects, etc.)? 3. Were there any other unexpected problems?  Tutee Report: The assignment that was brought it was a short one, and thus the tutoring session was unfortunately shorter than it ideally would have been otherwise. Nonetheless, quite a bit of useful feedback was gained and the tutoring session was on the whole successful. Due to the short length of the assignment, we were able to cover several different aspects of it, and of writing in general. I was able to implement several useful pieces of feedback into revisions of the assignment, with positive results. Overall, this session was limited by the short length of the assignment, but was still a successful demonstration of the basic principles of tutoring. There were no major problems during the session and several useful pieces of feedback were obta...

Reading Reaction Assignment: This week only one reading was assigned, however it was one of the most useful readings so far. The article's discussion of how to read like a writer was a very detailed and informative piece. Reading like a writer is something that I have already done before—examining a piece and trying to figure out what the author might have done differently—however I did not know until now what the term for doing this was. As a writer, I often find myself doing this whenever I read something—either for school or leisure—and have found it to be very helpful at times to break down what the writer tried to do, what they actually did, and what they could have done differently. This article goes even more in depth into the various ways readers can learn to read like a writer, and lists many different questions the reader can begin to ask themselves when reading the piece in order to better understand the writer and the piece alike. This article was very useful to me, ...