Tutoring Guidelines

Tutoring will be a little bit different depending upon whether you are:

a) Tutoring a person independently
b) Tutoring a person with the guidance of a teacher
c) Tutoring someone on-line

Here are our overall goals:

1) You will have some exposure to a non-native speaker of English and get a sense of their difficulties in communication.
2) The student will have an opportunity to interact with a native speaker of English (you) either in person or on-line
3) You will learn something about working with students
4) The student will learn something about improving their English, thanks to you!

If you are working independently, you should:

a) Make initial contact with your tutee and arrange a time and place to meet which is mutually convenient
b) At the initial meeting, spend some time getting to know the individual and letting them get to know you
c) Take some time to ask the student about their perception of their English needs. What are the areas where they would like to see improvement.
d) Make the expectations clear for them: what is your level of expertise? How often will you meet? What do you hope to accomplish? How long do you expect this relationship to last?
e) Leave the tutee an opportunity to opt out if they want to.
f) For the second meeting, prepare some materials based on their expressed needs. See me if you need help with this.

If you are working under the guidance of a teacher, follow their lead in the above steps, but still make sure that expectations are clear.

If you are working on-line, I will set you up with an on-line pen-pal. You should follow the above steps as best as you can, but this will be done via correspondence, so obviously there are some constraints on how you will be able to interact with them. If you are meeting someone directly, you can plan to spend time with them. If you are corresponding on-line, you will need to write more frequently.

You should plan to spend about 5 hours tutoring over the course of January.
Write a brief report for the end of the second and fourth weeks of class. In your report indicate who you are meeting with, how often you have met - or plan to meet or correspond with them. Something about their language background, and how you plan to help them. Just put together a one or two paragraph summary of what you've done.

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