Volunteers tutoring adults: The construction of literacy by tutor-student pairs.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Pomerance, Anita Humphreys.

Contributor:

Lytle, Susan L. (Susan Landy), 1942- advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Reading.

Adult education.

0516.

0535.

Penn dissertations--Education.

Education--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--Education.

Education--Penn dissertations.

0516.

0535.

Physical Description:

274 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 51-08A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

Because of the privacy of one-to-one instruction, little is known of the construction of adult literacy tutoring by trained volunteers and their students. This naturalistic study of the pedagogical and social interactions of tutor-student pairs explores tutors' and adult learners' beliefs about literacy and learning and the relationship between their stated beliefs and actual practices.

Data collection entailed audiotaping tutoring sessions, interviews, participant observation at meetings, and document analysis. Five tutor-student pairs audiotaped their sessions for periods ranging from 12 to 32 weeks. Tutors and adult learners were interviewed about their beliefs on literacy and learning. Program planners' concepts of tutoring were studied through analysis of training documents.

Views of literacy were analyzed by distinguishing among literacy as skills, tasks, practices and critical reflection (Lytle & Wolfe, 1990). Instructional materials and activities were categorized according to contrasting instructional orientations and tutor's interventions by degree of explicitness or open-endedness. The discourse of tutoring was analyzed according to three types of utterance: managing, evaluation and equalizing.

Tutors described the purpose of acquiring literacy as increasing learners' ability to perform real-world tasks, but their decoding emphasis in instruction and their interactions implied a primarily linear, subskills view of learning to read. As a group, tutors spent an average of 80% of the time monitoring oral reading. Texts' meanings were rarely discussed; when they were, instruction chiefly elicited recall. Writing, also infrequent, involved decontextualized words and sentences. Two distinctive relationships between tutors and students were found. In directive relationships, direct requests and display questions predominated. In conversational relationships, indirect requests and authentic questions predominated. While training documents stressed reading as making meaning, writing as self-expression and collaborative relationships, they also recommended a range of strategies implying a linear or subskills view of reading.

The study suggests that volunteer tutors represent a potential yet to be fully realized. They bring to tutoring tenaciously held traditional approaches to reading instruction, and despite the presentation of alternatives in the training, tend to teach in conventional ways. Future research is needed on tutors working in a variety of contexts to explore their prior experiences, training and instructional strategies.

Notes:

Thesis (Ph.D. in Education) -- Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 1990.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-08, Section: A, page: 2693.

Supervisor: Susan L. Lytle.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.