Research has shown that educators may be reluctant to implement group work in their teaching due to concerns about students partaking in off-task behaviours. However, such off-task interactions have been shown to promote motivation, trust, and rapport-building. This paper details a study in which student groups were video recorded as they engaged…

Although students' talk in problem-based learning (PBL) tutorials is the pivotal learning site in PBL, few studies have involved conducting a discourse analysis of this talk. This paper focuses on what we can learn about the PBL process from listening to how PBL students talked about it in naturally occurring talk in tutorials. The illuminative…

In the contemporary university the large classes associated with many core units mean that tutorials are often taken by many part-time sessional who are typically employed on a casual basis, paid an hourly rate and not paid to attend the lectures. Given this situation, unit coordinators are often responsible for another phase in curriculum…

One advantage of writing center tutorial groups over individual tutoring is that in groups students have the opportunity to become readers of others' writing and to provide feedback to their peers. In such groups, it is assumed that the tutor as facilitator serves as an interactional and linguistic model for students. To test this hypothesis, over…

An analysis was made of the strategies by which tutors adapt their teaching to individual students; the objective was to synthesize these strategies in a computer system called SCHOLAR. Tape recordings of dialogues between tutors and students about South American geography were made to discover the strategies used by tutors. Since SCHOLAR is a…

A study investigated metadiscoursal signalling devices used in discussions in a business administration course in a British university, focusing on the use and function of the devices in seminars and tutorials. Data were drawn from seminar and discussion classes recorded for distance education purposes. The corpus of about 30,000 words included 18…