Writing Center Observation 1 [3.21]

The tutoring session I observed today was between the tutor (obviously) and two other students whose native language was not English. Though these two students had grammar errors and clarity issues throughout their paper, the success of the tutoring session differed for each student. The tutor, I think, did a great job at explaining what each of the paper's errors were and what they each had to do in order to clean up these mistakes and leave the writing center with a much better understanding on what their next step will be. One of the tutees (let's call her Ana) had a pretty good understanding of what her professor wanted from her and the structure she had to follow in order to complete her assignment. She was not shy at all and was quick to speak up when she had a question about what the tutor had  throughout the session. Ana's overall understanding of the assignment was good, which I think helped tremendously in the outcome of the session. The only issue Ana had was of being sure she was able to say what she needed to say in English since her first language was obviously not English. While Ana worked on being a bit more clear with her sentences and her thesis, the tutor proceeded to help the other tutee (we'll call this tutee Mary.) Mary's first language was also not English so, like I mentioned earlier, she had problems in her paper similar to Ana's. Though Mary went into the writing center solely wanting to focus on her grammar, the tutor suggested that they work on other issues first before worrying about the grammar. Mary had trouble understanding what the professor wanted from her and how to go about meeting his/her requests.  Unlike Ana, Mary was way more shy and reluctant to speaking up when she didn't understand something; it was then when the tutor had to read Mary's body language and explain what she meant several times in order for Mary to fully understand what was wanted from her. In contrast to Ana, Mary didn't answer her professor's question and had provided irrelevant information in her paper, meaning that she would have to re-do her paper. Along with structure issues and lack of clarity on the assignment, Mary also had trouble wording out her thoughts.
For both the tutees, the tutor brought in several outline handouts which she suggested to both of them to make use of. I found interesting that she gave the tutees the option to pick which structure of the outline handouts worked for each best (because not all students learn the same.) The tutor's hand gestures were also (I think) very important in the way she explained  herself because it was a bit of an alert for both tutees to pay attention to what was going to be said.
Overall, I feel that the tutee did a really good job with two similar, but also very different tutees; and though I feel that Ana benefited more from the tutoring session than Mary, I think that Mary will definitely be back to the writing center with clearer thoughts and encouragement taken from the tutor to do better writing.