Week 8 - Online Tutoring Challenges

I actually do asynchronous on-line tutoring quite a bit with Chinese students' personal essays for college. Often, they are in a different time zone so they don't even get to see my comments for a while and vice versa, though I will work with the same student over an entire season so we have plenty of opportunities to connect. Challenges I've found include limiting my sheer volume of response in writing vs. speaking. Since I have a more personal relationship with these students, I also communicate with them in a social media messaging app and often send them long voice messages in addition to written comments. While the written comments are specific suggestions, my voice messages explain the reasoning behind the suggestions without needing to type out huge paragraphs of justification.

On the other hand, I do feel that using the medium of writing to critique writing is an interesting way to learn by example. The snippets in Remington's article where the tutor tried to imitate the writer's repetitive style were hilarious! I could also see simply using the marvelous Internet to find such examples. A writing center template instead of Tracked Changes also appeals to me (even though it may be more difficult to organize for the tutor) because it feels like giving a report or evaluation of the assignment rather than a more basic copy-edit of it.

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