Before this tutoring session with Ozan, I emailed him a list of sample TOEFL essay topics to choose from and asked, if he had time, would he want to write a thesis statement that we could work on and plan an essay outline during our next session. The morning of our tutoring day I check my email to find he’d written a full 5 paragraph essay on a chosen topic- such a devoted tutee! I printed the essay and tried to mark it using some of the error marks from class and made notes on how what to work on and why. When we met, I first and foremost praised is effort and overall success of 5 paragraphs organized as supporting points, each relating back to his thesis. I went through the rubic handout from class and we discussed how we would score the essay as is, concluding it could have been a 3 out of 5, and then worked on how to raise that. The biggest issues for Ozan’s writing are actually more tedious issues that I thought we’d deal with given his limited English study, but the main focus was developing more detailed support and examining how to make it even stronger in relation to the thesis. Also, though I explained it’s not a big deal and could be worked on later, more style issues such as word choice and strong verbs, active versus passive, etc. Though overall I’m impressed with where we got his essay to by the end of our session. I encouraged Ozan to take some of the supporting details we worked on and rewriting the body paragraphs for next time.
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