English Subject Centre Mini Projects

English Subject Centre Mini Projects

‘Writing in the Dark’:

Bringing Students’ Writing into the Light

Through Peer Tutoring

A final Report on the Project:

‘Exploring the Potential of Peer Tutoring in

Developing Student Writing’

As published in

The English Subject Centre

Newsletter no.9, October 2005

Authors: Jonathan Worley

Matthew Martin

St. Mary’s UniversityCollege, Belfast

October 2005

English Subject Centre Departmental Projects

This report and the work it presents were funded by the English Subject Centre under a scheme which funds projects run by departments in Higher Education institutions (HEIs) in the UK. Some projects are run in collaboration between departments in different HEIs. Projects run under the scheme are concerned with developments in the teaching and learning of English Language, Literature and Creative Writing. They may involve the production of teaching materials, the piloting and evaluation of new methods or materials or the production of research into teaching and learning. Project outcomes are expected to be of benefit to the subject community as well as having a positive influence on teaching and learning in the host department(s). For this reason, project results are disseminated widely in print, electronic form and via events, or a combination of these.

Details of ongoing projects can be found on the English Subject Centre website at . If you would like to enquire about support for a project, please contact the English Subject Centre:

The English Subject Centre

Royal Holloway, University of London

Egham, Surrey TW20 OEX

T. 01784 443221

For writing to achieve critical sophistication, it needs to ‘see the light of day’; however, in the case of many university students, their writing is never read more widely than by themselves and their markers. Their writing often occurs in an intensely private world where work is written hastily, in seclusion (perhaps late at night when it is dark outside) and then submitted with a prayer that it won’t be found wanting. Depending on the course and the lecturer, these students may receive little more than a number describing their work. Some students are more than content with this conclusion to the process, as further discussion would only increase their level of exposure to critique and interrogation – or so they fear.

However, we believe that good analytical writing is fruitfully nurtured in a more social environment. In other words, we view writing itself as a fundamentally social act, as opposed to the act of a solitary mind. We began our Writing Centre and its associated Peer Tutoring CETL(NI) project in 2001, convinced that the more students were willing and able to look at each other’s writing, the more that writing would improve. The question for us at St. Mary’s was how to bring students together and how to break down the barriers – both institutional and psychological -- that traditionally have prevented students from engaging with each other’s writing.

We reviewed a range of practices in use in the UK and abroad for bringing students together to critique each other’s work. Strategies for exposing students to each other’s writing have been practised for many years, particularly at American universities where writing classrooms are now familiar with such strategies as in-class writing, peer review and full-class discussions of samples of student writing. Most American universities now also have writing centres where students can bring their writing for review, and such centres are beginning to appear with greater frequency in the UK. Most interesting from our perspective was the practice in American universities of students tutoring other students, after having been trained in some basic principles of peer review.

We decided that student or ‘peer’ tutoring offered the most exciting opportunity for breaking down the barriers that kept our students ‘writing in the dark’. We decided this in part because we knew that when we were developing a piece of our own writing, we naturally turned to our friends and colleagues for help, seeking a friendly and receptive environment for initial feedback. We also sensed that the institutional hierarchy traditionally determining the intellectual relationship between students and tutors was not always conducive to good writing. We wanted to invite a group of students to become our peers in the quest for improving the writing of students generally, and to work collaboratively with them in developing our sense of how best to help students. In turn, we wanted them to learn to collaborate with their fellow students. Students coming to the Writing Centre are now met by just that – peer collaborators rather than evaluators.

In the spring of 2002, with the assistance of a grant from the English Subject Centre, St. Mary’s launched an initiative to train students how to talk to other students about improving their writing. Informally dubbed the ‘Peer Tutoring Project’, we asked for students of all abilities to declare their interest in joining us. In our first year, twelve students of differing abilities applied and were accepted. We believed that all of our students had enough linguistic sophistication to tutor other students if properly trained. They were not going to be expert writing commentators but rather expert facilitators, enabling students to re-examine their own writing with a renewed and refreshed critical perspective.

We offered six hours of initial training to our prospective tutors in four areas: (1) models for possible tutorial sessions, (2) models for understanding the writing process, (3) an examination of common grammatical errors, and, most importantly, (4) the review of a wide range of student essays.

The model that we developed for a student to conduct a one-on-one tutoring session allowed our tutors plenty of time to prepare for meeting with another student. Their students, or ‘tutees’, were required to submit essays in advance: these could be either essays on which the students were working or essays which had already received a mark but upon which a student wanted greater elaboration. Tutors would then privately read the work and prepare for the tutorial session. The tutors were asked to read for ‘content’, ‘focus’, ‘order’ and ‘development’ and then to perform a check for six very common grammatical errors. Armed with this information, they would then proceed to a tutorial session.

Tutors were asked to begin a session by asking the student what concerns they had about their writing and then to respond in one of two ways: (1) to agree that they had discovered similar concerns and then to go over the student’s essay in light of them, or (2) to politely disagree and to demonstrate to the student where they thought attention might be more fruitfully paid during the revision process. The tutor was asked to cover any additional points about the essay that they thought were relevant, including an analysis of any pattern of grammatical errors. Lastly, students were encouraged to summarise with both a positive comment about what the student was doing well and concise suggestions for improvement.

In those initial training sessions, we were impressed by the quality of student responses to written work, and when they exchanged work with each other, the tutors, too, saw the value of the peer review process. Their satisfaction levels with their own writing increased, as did their enthusiasm for discussing writing challenges with other students. In subsequent years, when we increased the period of training from two to ten hours, we concentrated less extensively upon lecture sessions and more intensively upon the practical work of reviewing student essays.

The process of introducing peer tutoring has not been without difficulties. First, there was the initial reluctance of lecturers and student tutees to trust the quality of student tutoring. These difficulties were gradually overcome as lecturers saw their students improving, and as students discovered the process was more helpful than painful. Secondly, not all of our peer tutors developed the good judgement we thought necessary to provide good tutoring. We carefully nurtured the weaker ones by asking them to meet with us before going out upon tutorial sessions, and, over the years, we have become more selective in our choice of peer tutors. In particular, we now rely heavily upon the recommendations of our fellow lecturers for the provision of good peer tutors. Central to our work is the recognition that we, as lecturers, are always learning to become better readers of students’ work while we simultaneously encourage our peer tutors to do the same.

We have recently diversified our training to make peer tutors more expert in particular subject areas. This latest development is at the heart of our new CETL-funded project, which allows us to integrate the writing demands of individual disciplines more accurately into our work, as well to engage in a more active and fruitful dialogue with staff members of every department and discipline. We are thus working toward greater ‘decentralisation’ of the writing centre.

Jonathan Worley ( ) and Matthew Martin () are co-directors of the ‘Centre for Learning and Teaching (Northern Ireland): Critical Thinking and Analytical Writing’ at St. Mary’s University College Belfast. They were formerly beneficiaries of a grant from the English Subject Centre (2002-2004) for their Peer Tutor Project. They would welcome inquiries from other institutions seeking to expand their written communications support.

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