Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Writing Tutorials

This week we are having tutorials to discuss the critical review assignment students are currently working on.

One of the purpose of the tutorials is to meet face to face with the students to discuss problems, difficulties, questions, issues, etc. they are having with writing the critical review. Another purpose of the tutorials is to give me the opportunity to ask clarification questions about the content, and it gives them the opportunity to display their knowledge about their topic, which is also good practice.

Tutorial Observations -
  • Students are more aware of how writing is done in their fields - one student in the hard sciences commented that complex sentence structure is commonly used, whereas participles aren't - he didn't provide/show specific examples of this; however, it's important to note because it shows that students are paying attention to how language is used in their respective fields
  • Many students struggle with clearly stating the purpose of their papers - this observation is more from reading the drafts than from the tutorials, but it seems to be the most common writing issue we discussed in tutorials - the question I have is how can this be better taught prior to the students writing the first draft? or is it best taught by students writing the first draft? To write their purpose statements, I give students this sample - The purpose of this paper is to (local focus) to (global focus). Students fill in the parenthese with the missing information. It seems somewhat prescriptive, however, at least it gives them something to try on until they can find their own sentence that is a better fit for them.
  • The audience issue also came up - Who are the students writing the critical review for? Several students told me that they thought I was their audience, so they didn't include complicated or technical information in their critical reviews because they thought I wouldn't understand what they were writing about. While this may be true, I encouraged the students in our tutorial discussions to conceptualize their audience as someone who knows their field, topic in order for them to get the most out of the assignment. It seems that the audience for most of the writing done by graduate students is someone who knows the field, topic.
  • The logistics of the tutorials is often problematic, not only for this particular class but for others as well. Some students don't come on time to the tutorials. Of course, this throws the schedule off, forcing other students who come on time to wait. For the most part these students seem to be forgiving, but there are some who get upset. I don't blame them and try to prevent this as much as possible, but it doesn't always work. Also, students often miss their tutorial times for various reasons, but then show up later expecting to discuss their paper at that exact moment. Other problems that have arisen are students showing up without their papers or students missing the tutorial without reason and then wanting to reschedule. These problems seem to be persistent with scheduling tutorials. I have yet to figure out how to remedy these situations. However, it seems that those students who do understand how a writing tutorial works, see benefit in it.

2 comments:

cherepaha said...

The usefulness of tutorial for advanced level students is to deal with the local knowledge of their writing. I used to try to cover a variety of different types of writing in the classroom, but I have given that up. Now I ask students to always bring a copies of research papers to tutorial, so if there is a question about rhetoric and grammar, we can at least find some examples from published texts. In my tutorials today, there were a number of questions ranging from the use of a/the, to how things were being explained and choices of vocabulary that I couldn't answer. I could only raise a question and let the student figure out the answer for themselves. Fortunately, I don't have to grade these papers so I don't have to worry about whether the students think I can evaluate their work.Often I can just tell them to try to notice how these things are done.

Students have trouble expressing the purpose of their papers because they don't really understand what they are writing about - who does! That is a fallacy of our teaching which I often apologize for in the classroom. This is also a problem in the original version of the Flower/Hayes process model - that student could actually figure out in the prewriting stage what they were going to do.Again, this is not how we really write. We should be writing backwards - do the paper and then figure out what it is about.This is true for the whole introduction.It should explain exactly what the writer is doing, so the writer has to know what they are doing and then write the introduction. If writing is a discovery and learning process, there is no way the student can clearly understand this until after a number of revisions - even three is not enough.This is where tutorials are essential - you can look at what they have and help them figure out what the purpose of the paper is supposed to be.

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