Assignment

Tutoring/Teaching/Coaching Journal and Report

1.     If you are tutoring, select one or more ESL student(s) who will agree to be your tutee(s) for 16 hours of instruction. Otherwise, you will work with a group of students as a coach or teacher (usually a coach, i.e., a classroom assistant).

2.     Establish the speaking and/or listening needs of your tutee/students, and select several points that you will treat during your tutoring or coaching sessions. Sequence these points if possible. To determine what content to cover, elicit ideas from the student(s)/instructor, consult course texts and other similar resources, and analyze recorded conversation to identify frequent or pervasive errors.

3.     For each tutoring/teaching/coaching session, review previous points and plan a variety of exercises for the present session. These exercises can be original or taken or adapted from textbooks.

4.     Consider keeping a careful audio-recordedlog of what happens during each tutoring/teaching (or coaching?) session, e.g., your preparation, exercises, reactions, comments from the tutee, etc. These should be a big help in writing your report. Audio logs will not be collected, but failing to keep one will probably make writing your report and journal more difficult.

5.     Keep a written journal or log of your tutoring/teaching/coaching activities. This will make it easier to write your final report. Keep it current—do not attempt to reconstruct activities near the end of the semester. Write at least one entry for each meeting with your tutee(s). In it, address points such “bigger picture” issues such as what your tutee(s) or student(s) are gaining from the experience, what you are gaining from the experience, or any insights you are gaining into language teaching and/or acquisition. Also, include all lesson plans and copies of any written activities or materials you use. This journal will constitute a source of documentation for your work. It should also help you to get more out of the experience. Therefore, although I will not read all of your journal, I will glance through it to make sure it is all there. It will be worth 10% of the grade on your tutoring report—include a complete journal, and you get the 10%. Leave it out, and you lose 10%. Include a semi-complete one, and get partial credit for 10% of the report.

6.     Your report should be a maximum length of eight (8) double-spaced pages, and should include the following seven sections, in this order:

a.     An introduction (1/3 page)

b.     A summary of your needs assessment, i.e., how you decided what the learners needed to learn (not what you decided) (1/3 page)

c.     A summary of how your contact hours were organized, i.e., what you did during a typical lesson—not on one specific occasion, but what you normally did (1 page)

d.     A description (list plus any explanation that might be necessary) of what speaking and/or listening points were covered over the course of the project (1 page)

e.     Your interactions with the student(s), and student responses (in terms of improvement, affect, acculturation, etc.) to the lessons and to the overall experience (2 pages)

f.      Suggestions for how you could improve your teaching/tutoring/coaching in the future; descriptions of what the host instructor should have done differently are irrelevant to this section, and will receive no credit (1/2 page)

g.     OPTIONAL Section: What the host instructor should do to improve his/her teaching (if you are coaching). This is completely separate from Section F. (1/3 page)

h.     A conclusion (1/3 page)

Please use section headings for each of the seven sections (eight sections, if you are coaching and add the optional section). Adjust possessive determiners appropriately.