This past Wednesday I had my
first tutoring session with Shuo. She is a good deal more advanced than any of
the other students from CIES that I’ve interacted with through the program so
far. I could always understand what she meant and she didn't seem to have as
much trouble understanding me as the other students. She has a 10 page research
paper due by the end of the month that she hadn't started writing yet, so I helped
her organize that. She had already gather quite a number of articles to use for
her paper, the topic of which is language learning strategies and styles from
different backgrounds. The first thing I did was show her how to organize her
articles into categories so that she could better understand what themes to
incorporate into her paper and where and how to use the articles. We looked through
a few of them, reading the abstracts and skimming the discussion/conclusion
sections to try to narrow down a category for the article. For example, a
couple of the categories we defined were learner motivation and teaching strategies.
The articles that she had were so inarguably and markedly academic that it was
hard for even me to skim them and glean much meaning from what I’d read. They
definitely required a careful and analytic reading to understand. After that I
showed her some example outlines for research papers and found a good template
for her to use when outlining her own paper. I’m going to email her about our
next meeting to see if she has anything else she’d like to work on with me or
if there’s anything that I can prepare for her since I can’t do much else with
the research paper besides show her how to organize it and proof read it for
her.
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