College Mentoring Session #2

Kaleigh and I met with my college-mentoring student last Wednesday, and she had improved her essay from last time by quite a bit. However, I must admit that I was grateful that Kaleigh was there as when the student left to answer a quick phone call, we were able to discuss our plan of action. The paper had numerous repetitions of similar or of the same sentence throughout the paper, and the grammar was all over the place as English is her second language. Thus the plan was to address the larger issues of content. I did this by having her read the topic sentence and seeing if that sentence applied to the rest of her paragraph. More often then not, it was her second sentence that actually was a great topic sentence. But looking at the topic sentences, we were able to help her realize that she was just repeating herself everywhere. I was a bit lost though as although I had really helped her with the content and topic sentences (which she had told me from the start that she has trouble with) I felt that I didn’t help her grammar, which I felt greatly affected the clarity of her writing. In this situation I was torn when deciding what to focus on. I think this really brings into question how to tutor ESL students. Overall though, I felt good about how the session went.