Tutoring is a rapidly increasing but under-researched component of the education
of immigrant students. This study examines one-on-one tutoring of Taiwanese high
school immigrant students in Vancouver. Viewing tutoring as a social practice rather than
an instructional tool for teaching academic content, this exploratory study attempts to
understand how participants construct tutoring in the British Columbian educational
context. Factors such as the patterning of tutorials, the participants' perspectives, and the
wider educational context have been considered in this study.
This study recruited 12 tutor-tutee pairs, 12 parents, and 10 school teachers.
Tutoring interactions were tape-recorded over a ten-month period. Combining aspects of
discourse analysis and qualitative research, this study used discourse analysis to study
tutoring interactions and qualitative interviews to explore the participants' beliefs about
tutoring and schooling. This study explored the interaction patterns of tutoring, examined
the participants' assumptions and expectations, and investigated the relationship between
the tutoring (informal learning) and the schooling (formal learning) process of immigrant
students.
The varied patterns of tutorials suggested that tutoring went beyond teaching
academic content and served multiple functions for the immigrant families. The patterns
focused on addressing the needs of parents and students to interact with their schools, and
providing emotional and cultural support. In addition, there seemed to be conflicting
voices among the participants regarding the tutorial practices. For example, participants
expressed strong and opposing views about the goals of tutoring and the quantity of homework, academic content instruction and grammar instruction in tutoring and in
schools. These different voices seemed to cause tensions which were explored and
negotiated in tutoring interactions. Lastly, the relation between tutoring and its wider
educational context was both cooperative and conflictual. For example, while tutoring
offered students homework assistance, this assistance caused the school teachers to be
concerned with tutor over-helping. Thus, there is a complex and interactive relationship
between tutoring and the educational system. To conclude, studying tutoring as a social
practice acknowledges the varied tutorial patterns, the conflicts, the dynamics, and the
complexity of tutoring interactions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/15157 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Wu, Angela Mei-Chen. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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