Response 3

Peer Tutoring in Writing: A school systems approach

This paper studies seven 10-year-old to 11-year-old students peer-tutored seven six-year-old students in writing over a 10-week period compared with the control group without tutors’ assistance. The study shows that the students with tutors’ assistance improve their writing a lot. The author also recommends the school to adopt this tutoring approach to help students learn writing.


I appreciate the peer tutoring approach. In some way, the relationship between my tutors and I is similar to this kind of relationship for our ages are close to each other. In peer tutoring approach, students will feel more comfortable during peer interactions so that cognitive growth and skills may be more easily developed than in traditional teacher-and- student interactions. Besides, peer tutoring can promote the concept of altruism by helping each other to correct their writing and both tutors and tutees grow up in the process. What’s more, it can also raise students’ intrinsic motivation.


In the article, there are ten steps for tutoring writing :
1. Assists tutee to develop a plan for writing
2. Uses questions to expand on/clarify plan for writing
3. Assists with development of a written plan (e.g., word web) and/or
identification of key ideas
4. Provides prompts to assist tutee with writing process
5. Provides encouragement to writer during writing processes
6. Assists writer to attempt difficult words
7. Asks questions to promote editing changes/additions
8. Prompts or assists with proof-reading for accuracy in spelling
9. Prompts or assists with proof-reading for accuracy in punctuation
10.Provides praise/encouragement for writer’s efforts
In these ten steps, we can find that two of the steps emphasize on the encouragement toward tutees in order to build up their confidence to keep writing. Besides, some steps focus on details, such as word use, spelling, and punctuation. This study also shows that these details improve most in peer tutoring approach.