Adrienne Cardoza TESOL429-McCollum 11/23/13 Writing Coach Log

Student Description: Airi Sakuma has been studying English for a few years now and is an advanced student in the BYU-Hawaii EIL program. All through high school she had English classes but felt that she did not learn very much from them especially when dealing with academic writing. When she got older however, she studied at Utah Valley University in their English program for about one and a half years before going on an English speaking mission in California. Airis spoken English is very proficient, but she feels that she has many weaknesses in writing. According to the ACTFL scale I would place Airis writing at advanced low. She has difficulty staying on topic, using correct citations, understanding fully the topic that she is writing on and she also relies on her spoken language too often and incorporates much of her first language into her writing habits. Some of her strengths that I, as her tutor, have noticed are that she has a wide vocabulary range and is able to give good descriptions. One of Airis goals for this course is to Be able to write in a more professional way by writing in more academic form, instead of a conversation. In order to accomplish this goal we will be working on developing a thesis,

staying on topic, transitionsmaking the paper flow, and understanding the topic better through good reading and listening habits. Coaching Sessions: Week 1: Today we went over the first draft of Airis paper. We actually went through it in a great detail. She seems to be very enthusiastic about improving her writing skills and was very involved in the session. Today we went over both local and global issues, though I think she needs to work on organization and flow more than local issues. Usually after re-reading her sentences she realizes her grammatical mistakes but she has trouble figuring out the order in which she should write things and how to give more detail. I would have her explain what she wanted to say by just talking to me and then I would have her write it down in a more academic way. She has trouble getting the words down on paper even though she knows what she wants to say so I think it helps her to say it out loud. I learned this method of helping students articulate what they want to write from class, Brother McCollum said that he often does this to help students so I decided to try it as well. I feel that it was very successful in helping her organize her thoughts and realize that she does know what to write about. We also worked on keeping the tense consistent throughout the entire paper, she mixes tenses a lot so we went through and first decided which tense she wanted to use for the paper and then re-read and changed everything to the correct tense. I did this because in class we learned that it is important to fix mistakes that occur often so I decided to fix early before it became a habit.

Next time I will try to focus only on the bigger more blatant mistakes as in this session we went through her paper line by line, which not only took a lot of time but I think she can do that on her own without me. So instead I will focus on more rhetorical issues and the flow of the paper rather than grammatical issues. She also has another tutor and utilizes the reading writing center so they can help her with that. Week 2 &3 (I hour session): Week two was very similar to week 1 in that we went through her paper in a very detailed manner. I gave her a lot of feedback on local issues mostly because she wanted it. She wrote down everything and you could tell that she was actually going to put it to use so I had no hesitation in giving her that much feedback though I think it could get overwhelming for her if I did this for every session. I probably wont do it next time. We were able to discuss a little about what she wanted to add to her paper as well. She knows what she wants to say but when it comes time to write she has trouble. I told her that I think she would benefit greatly if she discussed the articles with one of her classmates, that way they can get new ideas from each other and better articulate what the articles are about. One of the articles we read in class discussed the importance of peer review and how fixing another students paper can help students articulate what they know. I feel that this goes along the same lines; by discussing the articles they are learning to articulate the readings and thus understanding them better as well as getting other view points on the topic. She has a lot of trouble with plural endings (Japanese doesnt have any) so we went over all the nouns that needed to be changed in her essay. By the end she was the one

catching the mistakes as I just read her paper out loud. I feel that when you read your paper silently you tend to automatically fix the mistakes in your head rather than on the paper so I feel that reading her paper out loud helped her comprehend her writing more and because she is more proficient in listening and speaking she can use those more advanced skills to her benefit. She also tends to not have a thesis, and when I asked her what she is writing about she cant answer so I think we will go over that next week. Week 4: For week four she did not have anything that she had already written so instead we went over the outline that was given to her to begin writing her paper. We also talked about thesis statements. To my surprise, Airi didnt know what a thesis statement was. So we briefly went over it in accordance to the outline. She also asked about the first sentence of the paper and how she can hook the audience, it mentioned a hook sentence in the outline. I gave her some examples and told her what the hook sentence is for and she seemed to understand better. In class I have learned from various sources that giving examples is almost always more effective than explaining so I found examples so that she could better understand the concept. I also gave her advice on how to read the articles in a more efficient way, as she asked for my advice. I told her to having a question in mind as she is reading will help her concentrate more on what she is trying to find. Which is why it is so important for her to have a thesis statement, otherwise you are just reading and not getting anything out of the article. So developing or just simply understanding the thesis or topic of the prompt is the first step to

understanding the readings. I told her to take notes and read the conclusion of the articles first so that she could have a better idea of what the article was about as she read, which advice was given to me as a student during class which I found to be effective. I also told her again to discuss the articles with someone. She didnt have many questions for me so I decided to ask her a few. She wants to be able to write in a more academic way, she is very good at speaking and getting her ideas across through speech but writing academically is hard for her. As we go through the paper together I often point put words or phrases and ask her how she can say them in a more academic way and she is usually quite good at doing if someone explicitly says this isnt very academic, how can you change it she just needs to become more aware of it when she is on her own. She also knows that she has trouble staying on topic which is yet another reason why we need to work on thesis development. Next week I will be checking to see if she has a thesis statement in her paper. Week 5: Week five we looked at her issues paper where she was talking about starvation in the Middle East. She had a fairly well done paper giving reasons and examples except she had no thesis. In the tutor appointment before this one she had mentioned that she didnt really know what a thesis statement was so I looked up a few examples and definitions and we had a very brief mini lesson on what a thesis is and how to write it. We then began writing her thesis for her paper. I asked her what her paper was supposed to be about and all the sub categories for it, we wrote them out and began piecing it together. The hardest part was not getting the thesis

but getting the wording correct because it had to match the order that the paper was in already. Because this week we only met for 30 minutes we finished her thesis and then ran out of time. Her writing is becoming more whole and the transitioning is well done, now she needs to work on more local issues by herself, or I recommended she go to the reading writing center for that, which she actually did. Explaining how to make a thesis is harder than I thought. She was having trouble with the concept because she was used to just writing with no apparent purpose. Now that she knows you need to write a thesis first and then the rest of the paper I think she will improve greatly in the next few weeks. Week 6: Airi was just assigned a paper so we went over what is was and began working on the introduction. She is still struggling on how to start the paper so I asked her about any facts she knows about GMO food, the topic of her paper. She said Most American food is GMO so I said Great! Write that, I think she is starting to understand the concept of getting the audience interested while staying on topic and she seemed to understand once we began writing. She was also a little confused with pros and cons, she actually thought that pros meant against while cons meant for, so we went over that and then discussed what the goods and bads of GMO food are. I was happy to see that she took my and probably her classes advice and wrote notes on the reading and videos she watched. We did not actually write the introduction but she made an outline of what she wanted to write when the time came. She is forming very good writing strategies, recently in class we talked about the difference between a strategy and

a skill and I believe Airi is on her way to making all these strategies like making an outline, taking notes etc. into skills that she can use automatically without any help. She is starting to get the concepts of the introduction a lot more than when we first started meeting! Weeks 7&8 (1 hour session): This week she completed her GMO six page paper which is due on Monday. I had her email me her paper beforehand so that I could make copies and read ahead. When she arrived I gave her a copy of her paper and asked her to read through it and make any fixes that she thought the paper needed while I did the same thing at the same time. This was to show her that she has the ability to edit her own papers. After we both finished going through the paper we came together and talked about why we each changed certain things. This was so that she could articulate why she thought something was wrong and so she could see that we edited her paper similarly to show her that just simply by proofreading her paper she can improve her writing by her own means and without some elses help. I went through and only fixed major things because 6 pages is too long to go through every detail. She wrote some things that I didnt so we talked about those and then we talked about mine and she made corrections accordingly. I think it was good for her to read through her own writing and make corrections because I dont think she proof reads very often. Overall, the session went well, she became more aware of her writing and was eventually able to correct it. I also think it was good for us to discuss why we marked certain things on each paper.

Reflection This assignment was a very good opportunity for me because I have little experience in tutoring writing and am not very comfortable doing it. However, throughout the past eight or so weeks of doing this tutoring I have come to see that yes, I actually can help students become more effective writers. I am much more comfortable with guiding someone and informing them on how to make a better paper. If there is one thing that I learned from this assignment it would be that you cant fix everything. For our first few sessions we would spend more than an hour or so picking through every single sentence to make sure it was perfect and made sense but then I didnt know what the paper was about, I didnt think about the thesis or even if the paper was organized correctly. Based on what we have discussed in class I learned that I need to look at the bigger picture, fixing only major local mistakes and then global ones, especially because Airi is an advanced student. Airi is a very hard worker so this painstaking method worked for her, but I have learned that that will not be the case for most people and that all those red marks really demotivates a student so I will most likely not correct every single mistake in the future. I think one of my strengths was helping her come up with the corrections for herself. I would ask her questions or give her ideas that enabled her to eventually complete the task on her own. I think this made her feel more independent and helped her realize that she can write fairly well. Tutoring someone else on writing has helped me become a better writer, especially on a global level. I have never really had the chance to read a fellow students writing before so this opportunity helped me see my strengths and weaknesses in writing through my tutees paper. I started using the strategies that I was introducing to Airi. In order to comprehend what I am

reading for my writing I have started by reading the introduction and conclusion first, or reading while thinking about my thesis, writing notes about what I have read etc. By actually practicing what I am teaching I am not only becoming a better teacher but a better learner. I have also learned the importance of simply rereading your writing. Many times Airi would read a sentence just once and realize what her mistake was, I need to proof read as well. This assignment has really helped me become more confident in teaching writing and has helped me develop my own person means of teaching /tutoring writing.