Blog 20

Cases:
Case #1
Maria is an undergraduate ESL student; she is doing her bachelor’s in Psychology and she came to the writing center to have some help with a paper she needs to be turned in that same day. She started talking in English but the tutor responded in Spanish so she seemed surprised. She was talking in Spanish, very loud and quick; she sat down and started everything out of her bag. I realized with this behavior that she was very anxious. She was rushing because she needed to finish the paper so she can turn it in that day. The assignment was to do a comparison between two readings. When she came she already has most of the paper done and revised by the professor. What she was missing was the conclusion, so she set the agenda for the session; she wanted to work on the conclusion. The tutor (Sandra) started reading the paper, and asked her if she had an assignment sheet, but she didn´t. After Sandra read the paper she noticed that even though she talks about the two stories there was not a comparison of them. So she gave Maria a sheet of paper so she can start writing some of the answers that Sandra was about to ask. One of the faculty members of the university came into the room were the session was taking place just to see in Sandra was doing ok (Sandra is a peer tutor in training). After the teacher left the room, Maria took out a paper graded by her professor and that said what Maria needed to work on. The curious thing here was that Maria told Sandra that she didn´t took out that paper before because she was afraid of the teacher. After Sandra explain what Maria was asked to do, she started asking some questions so Maria could understand what she needed to do. Sandra asked questions such as what were the values of the hero en in the first story and in the second one. To describe the hero´s personalities, etc. At that point Maria started writing.