The role of tutor as the mentor in academic writing

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35433/pedagogy.2(97).2019.71-78

Keywords:

tutor, academic writing, writing skills, tutor’s role, effective studying, higher education.

Abstract

The article touches upon the issue of tutor’s role in academic writing. Innovation of pedagogical technologies demands new approach in educational process. In recent years there has been considerable interest in tutoring as an effective method of teaching students at universities. Much attention is given to the place of a tutor in academic writing. Much is known about tutoring system and tutors in academic writing in Great Britain but very little in Ukraine. We describe and analyze the role of a tutor in academic writing in order to demonstrate positive British experience of improving approaches for successful students’ studying. The correlation between tutor in academic writing and high level of successful student’s studying is interesting because it shows the positive dynamic of educational quality. This highlights just how important tutor in educational process is. These results widen our knowledge of tutor’s roles and offer compelling evidence for implication the position of academic writing tutor in Ukraine. The article gives a detailed analysis of writing tutorial’s characteristic. The research aim is to characterize a modern role of tutor in academic writing, relying on progressive foreign experience. The following objectives have been set:

1) to find out a concept essence of the tutor in academic writing;

2) to allocate a role of the tutor as the mentor in academic writing;

3) to describe the prospects of application of this role at Ukrainian universities. Research methods were used: theoretical analysis and generalization of data of scientific and methodical literature, pedagogical observation and synthesis. As a result it is proved that a tutor as a mentor in academic writing makes great influence on educational process. The following conclusions are drawn that a tutor in academic writing develops the student’s potential through cooperation and student’s individualization in studying. Our research has highlighted the importance of tutor’s role in academic writing. This study is the first step towards enhancing our understanding of tutor’s role in education. Our work clearly has some limitations. Nevertheless we believe our work could be the basis for further observations of implementation tutoring system in Ukrainian education.

References

Harris, M. (1995). Talking in the middle: Why writers need writing tutors. College English, 57 (1), 27–42 [in English].

Thonus, T. (2002). Tutor and student assessments of academic writing tutorials: What is "success"? Assessing Writing, 8, 110–134 [in English].

Falleta, E. Tutor Training Manual (n.d) Retrieved from www.cgc.edu/Academics/LearningCenter/Training/Documents/Tutor_Training_Manual.pdf [in English].

William, B.Wood, Kimberly, D.Tanner (2012). The Role of the Lecturer as Tutor: Doing What Effective Tutors Do in a Large Lecture Class. CBE Life Science Education. Retrieved from www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3292071. DOI: 10.1187/cbe.11-12-0110 [in English].