Masters Thesis

The impact of one-on-one tutoring on ESL learners' writing

Tutoring centers are often visited by adult ESL learners with persistent concerns about sentence-level, linguistic features in their writing (i.e., “grammar”), even when such concerns are not aligned with issues that need to be prioritized. This leaves tutors the challenging task of simultaneously addressing learners’ concerns and writing needs with limited guidance provided by adult, ESL tutoring literature. To address this, this research set out to examine the impacts of ESL tutoring and thereby identify ideal, one-on-one tutoring practices that support ESL learners’ writing needs while enhancing their acquisition of sentence-level, linguistic features in the context of their writing. To this end, three college-level, ESL case-study participants were tutored one-on-one over a 14-week period and their writing samples were documented and examined for linguistic changes. Triangulation of the combined quantitative and qualitative data results revealed that tutoring can significantly encourage ESL learners’ language acquisition; however, this potential was strongly affected by proficiency, self-efficacy, and motivation.

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