Final research plan

Statement: When there is an ESL Student who takes control of the coaching and how does that affect both the student and the tutor in an undergraduate writing center?Detailed statement of your research question?The key to tutoring ESL students - or anyone else - remains respecting the student, meeting their needs, and providing a solid structure for their lessons. I have found that using a set text, developing a known routine, and combining conversation, vocabulary and writing skills makes for a successful and satisfying experience. Sometimes people who are ESL students come to the writing center for the tutor to proofread their paper because many of them have trouble with sentence structure. Sometimes the tutor has to start off with maybe a question to get the student to work on their paper themselves. The tutor is there to support and encourage the students to do their best.

For example, in the essay by Judith Powers the author states that collaborative approaches that tutors use to good effect with native writers often fail when applied to ESL writers, who bring to the writing center different culture values, needs, rhetorical strategies, and attitudes toward the tutor-student relationship (pg 368 of Blummer and Barrnett). I agree with this statement because every relationship and situation differs because it depends on the individual as I hope to show through out my data. Sometimes the tutor has to set the agenda where at others times some students set the agenda themselves by coming into the writing center with a purpose.

One of the articles that I am using is “Are we encouraging patchwriting? Reconsidering the role of the pedagogical context in ESL student writers’ transgressive intertextuality by Ali R. Abasi and Nahal Akbari. This article speaks about how students have trouble meeting the needs of what Esl Students need. This research focuses on the range of cognitive and social reasons behinds ESL students’ transgressive textual appropriation.
Another article that I have found that is relevant to my research is an article Novice Tutors and their ESL tutees: This article speaks about three case studies of three /tutor and this research focuses on the negotiation of tutor roles over a semester as part of a course requirement for Matesol candidates. I will be comparing my results to this and it will be based on undergraduate students.

Another article that I have looked at is The writer center and second language writers by Jessica Williams and Carol Severino. A statement that I found from this article is that many writers want and expect their tutors to take an authoritative role or at least respond to the learners needs” (Williams, J).

However, I‘ve had the opportunity to tutor some wonderful students who have very high expectations. I feel that if the students could focus some more on their paper then he or she would benefit from the session. I admire their honesty and I appreciate those who have let me observe them while they were tutoring. However, in order to make my research more effective, I feel that I could tutor some more students and observe some more sessions. Thank you Dr. Chandler for guiding me in the right direction to start my paper. Thank you to Danny for letting me observes her sessions. Thank you to everyone who has played a part in this ongoing research.