My first observation was with a graduate student session, with both the student and the tutor in grad school. The student, who I will call Christina, had a business-like manner about her. She asked the tutor direct questions about her paper about grammatical issues. In other words, she had come prepared. She had basic concerns: sentence structure, organization, typos, and APA citations. Christina asked the tutor if he was an expert on APA citations. He replied, “Not personally, but we do have handbooks here to help you out.” It was great; he implied that he had used it before, but was by no means the expert in the situation. Together, they were students in search of the answers.
They went through the standard requirements of the average session: she’d been there before, read her paper, and corrected many grammatical mistakes on her own. Every now and then she would peer intently at her page, and ask the tutor if what she had written down sounded correct. After she fixed the basic errors (by herself), she came to the conclusion that one of her sentences sounded weird. The tutor simply asked “What about the sentence sounds weird?” They figured out the cause together. I really liked the tutor I observed because he gave his opinion when asked, and analyzed sentences to find the grammar problems she knew existed, but couldn’t identify.
Another crucial bit of dialogue I found helpful was when she asked if a sentence made sense. He replied, “Let me read it for you, so you can hear it…” This helped tremendously, because it’s one thing to read your own paper out loud, but a completely different concept to hear someone else read it to you.
The tutor pulled the APA citation book out at the end of the session, and thumbed through the index. The student laughed to herself, and told him that she owned the book he was searching through!
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