LEARNING OUTCOMES/OBJECTIVES

Tutor LOs: 
To create a contextualized, student-centered revision process 

• Tutors will be able to (TWBAT) negotiate the session’s agenda regarding local concerns with the student. 

• TWBAT focus local grammar concerns to one major grammar concern. 

• TWBAT guide students with finding patterns in correct and incorrect forms of the grammar concern. 

• TWBAT foster student participation to encourage student agency in the tutoring session.   

Student LOs: 

• Students Will Be Able To (SWBAT) find examples of a grammar concern in their writing. 

• SWBAT find patterns in correct and incorrect forms of the grammar concern. 

• SWBAT articulate a definition of the grammar concern. 

• SWBAT list steps to identify forms of the grammar concern. 

• SWBAT develop strategies for revising incorrect forms. 

MATERIALS NEEDED

INSTRUCTIONAL PLAN

Introduction (10% of entire lesson time) 

Context Building  

 

Body of Lesson (80% of entire lesson time) 

Note: This section will use S for students and T for tutors. For the purposes of this lesson plan, the facilitator will take the T role and the tutors will take the S role. This will also allow facilitators to easily print this section for tutors’ use. 

The student (S) and tutor (T) work together as necessary, i.e., when S can no longer define, identify, or revise the grammar concern. Otherwise, T mostly facilitates S’s process in creating the revision guide. 

Context Gathering (10% of lesson body time) 

 
Awareness Building (15% of lesson body time) 

Scaffolding (35% of lesson time) 

Authentic Revising (30% of lesson body time) 

Closing (10% of lesson body time) 

1. S continues revising their writing and their guide until the session is almost over. 
2. T closes the session by summarizing the iterative nature of developing a revision guide.  
3. T refers S to additional resources for the session’s grammar concern, describing how it connects to a specific section of the revision guide.

Conclusion (10% of entire lesson time) 

Closing  

1. Facilitator (F) reiterates that this tutoring strategy can be applied in sessions where students want to focus on revising systematic grammar concerns, with the additional benefit of encouraging student involvement and agency.  

2. Optionally, the F can also:

   1. F can elicit and share tips on how to integrate this strategy into sessions as well as what they can do to be flexible to a student’s resistance to create flashcards. F can allow time to annotate their guide with these tips. Note: The "tips" are meant to be general and adapted to each facilitator's writing center demographic and tutors. The F doesn't have to share any tips, but if the F has anything to add that can help their tutors integrate the concept more effectively with the students they work with, this closing section of the lesson is where they can add that information. 

   2. F can share any additional resources with the tutors that may extend their learning, show them where to find the needed materials in the Center, and/or create a resource area for the tutors to access materials when needed (e.g., a resource shelf, cabinet, box, shelf for useful reference books or guides, etc.) 

ASSESSING FOR UNDERSTANDING

The facilitator and tutors will know whether they have met the learning objectives based on the student’s understanding and notes in these sections:  

To maintain the lesson’s focus on a process that uses communicative language teaching, tutors should prioritize overviewing and trying all sections rather than focusing on only one. Leaving one section as a work-in-progress is typical, and thus reinforces an iterative revision process.  

Along these lines, focusing on the quantity or quality of definitions/examples/strategies within a section is a secondary measure to assess a tutor’s progress with their student. 

Finally, the sections will ideally be populated with the student’s language. If a tutor needs to fill a knowledge gap, they should still take the opportunity to help the student recast it into their own language.

EXTENSIONS AND ADAPTATIONS

• This lesson plan (LP) describes the revision guide being written on a piece of paper. It can be written on anything as long as the distinct sections, which correspond with the process, remain. For example, it could be a Google Doc with jumpable headings for each section.  
  
  Alternatively, in a smaller scale session, a tutor could forgo making the guide, and instead use the sections as a framework to guide their session. For example, a tutor could inquire about their student’s current definition about their writing concern and elicit examples of the concern in their writing, before turning the shortened session to a discussion of possible identification and revision steps.  
  
  
• This LP can be modified if the student does not have any writing to pull examples from or apply strategies to. If possible, the tutor can allow the student to generate their own writing; otherwise, the tutor and student can find sample text. The former is preferable because it maintains the student-centered nature of the revision process, keeping the student engaged with more genuine, relevant examples. 
  
  
• This LP describes the guide being used with a sentence-level concern. However, CLT allows this process to be used for any writing topic due to the likelihood of an information gap (e.g., a tutor lacking the student’s context-specific knowledge). For example, the process (of defining something, listing helpful/not helpful examples, identifying opportunities for revision, and developing steps for revision) can be applied to genre (i.e., a student wanting to make sure their writing matches its intended genre conventions) or thesis statements (i.e, a student wanting to know whether their thesis is “strong”). In these situations, the tutor still facilitates the student’s development of knowledge in order to complete a task. 
  
  
• An adaptation for a group tutoring or workshop setting can give the responsibility to the entire group to negotiate as they populate each section, as demonstrated in this training session with the facilitator acting as a single tutor and the tutoring staff acting as students. For example, the group can list each member’s definitions and then decide together their agreed upon definition. If a collaborative paper is being written, a similar negotiation of meaning can occur for helpful examples and identification and revision steps to develop a sort of style guide for the writers. 

REFERENCES

Brandl, K. (2008). Principles of communicative language teaching and task-based instruction. In Communicative language teaching in action: Putting principles to work (pp. 5-23). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Griffiths, C. M., Murdock-Perriera, L., & Eberhardt, J. L. (2023). "Can you tell me more about this?": Agentic written feedback, teacher expectations, and student learning. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 73, 102145. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2022.102145

Nunan, D. (1991). Communicative tasks and the language curriculum. TESOL Quarterly, 25(2), 279-295. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587464 

Porter, P., & VanDommelen, D. (2005). Read, write, edit: Grammar for college writers (p. 149). Heinle, Cengage Learning.