Meeting with my student for the third week really helped him feel more comfortable with me. We spent a lot of time discussing his works, looking over comments that I had made and thinking about ways to improve upon his writing (which was great to begin with).
Prior to our Monday morning mentoring session, I found a resource that I found very useful. It detailed the basic steps to follow for an essay outline. Moreover, it also gave descriptions of the various types of essays. (The PDF can be found at the following link: http://sparklearning.org/english/essay.pdf). I did not print out a copy for my student, but I emailed him the link and spent some of our time together discussing the various types of essays that can be written and stressing the notion that even though he is writing a different type of essay, the basic structure always remains the same. Although it seems slightly repetitive, students tend to struggle when organising their thoughts and writing an essay (I noticed this during my first placement in an English class).
My student also informed me that he had difficulty finding sources when writing his essays. I gave him a tip, letting him know that he can begin by looking at wikipedia, reading the articles that they have which are similar to his topic and then looking up their sources to use. I also told him that newspaper articles and journals were another useful way to find information on a given topic.
No comments:
Post a Comment