Remember to Focus on Student Needs
The key to a successful tutorial is focusing on what the student needs to learn instead of what the mentor wants to teach. The student establishes the direction of the session and the mentor has to be ready with whatever explanation is called for. The mentor also has to be able to read between the lines and understand the roots of a student’s question whose answer may be based in grammatical concepts not covered by the actual lesson.
Preparation for the mentoring session involves complete preparation of the material the student has covered but it must go further as mentors need to consider what questions could evolve as a result of the material assigned. Unlike in the conversation session, the language of interchange can be the target language, English, or a mixture of both.