Student Matching

Connection history & Results

Goals
Rules
Netiquette

"One purpose of this correspondence with your students is for our students to experience and  practice their on-line teaching skills (it is highly likely that this is their first time teaching on-line), since they are obtaining their teacher certificate, they will become teachers in Texas after their graduation from A&M.  However, please do not feel uncomfortable by our goal, this teaching can be casual teaching, we do not need to see serious improvement in your students writing skills by the end of the project, we simply want our students to experience it and later on be able to express their thoughts.  Our students can just teach one principle  (e.g. an English writing principle) this time, or, as you have suggested, to simply correct grammar and wordings,  and achieve other purposes of this connection, which include communication with each other, establishing friendship, and exchanging cultural information.  We certainly are not going to evaluate our students based  your students' performance." (Yu-chih Doris Shih) 
(Students are supposed to set up their own more specific goals.)

Junior Composition and Conversation Sec C (Teacher: Cecilia Liu & Kate Liu)

The peer-tutoring project is a good chance for our students to write/talk to American students about topics they are interested in and improve their English.   They are communicating as friends, pen-pals more specifically, but the American tutors also set up instructional goals with our students to conduct online teaching. 

-- Practice communication skills; 

-- Practice self-motivated learning. 

-- Practice introducing our cultures.

-- Practice setting up an instructional objective within a short time with a tutor from a distance, follow it through and/or modify it.

General Requirements
Special Reminders for Fu Jen students: 

• Save all the sent and recieved mails in chronological order.
• Mark the dates when they sent and recieved emails on the calendar.  (Both the calendar and the mails will be handed in together with the final formal report.) 
• Because the connection period is really short, and it is over the week after our midterm, 
• report to your teacher/supervisor if you have not recieved responses from your pal for a week; 
• continue the correspondence during mid-term. 
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b) Save all the (sent and received) mails in chronological order on a Word Document file.  The sent and recieved mails should all be turned in at the end of the project, together with your final report.

c)  Bi-weekly informal email report to the teacher about how the communication goes (deadlines for the report will be specified by your teacher/supervisor).

d)  Inform your teacher in case you do not receive mails from your pal for a week and start to keep journal.

f)  Acknowledgement of help: If you get help in revising your paper from the American tutor, acknowledge it by 
attaching your tutor's correction and/or comments  to the later draft, as well as the final draft, of the paper to let the teacher know. 

1) feel free to use first names to personalize the connection. 

2) Try to respond promptly to messages that you receive.   Once the peer-tutoring correspondence pattern is set up, students have to let the other party know if they have to be out of touch for a few days. 

3) Be gentle with criticism. 

4) For the sake of communication, don't just talk about oneself in the  mail; talk to the other party and ask him/her questions. 

5) Use descriptive titles: The subject line tells people what your message is about before they read it.  People with limited time can decide whether to read it at that time, delete it, or save it for later.  The title space 
is limited and they are truncated after the space is filled, so keep them short and to the point. 

6) When responding to a controversial topic, you should carefully consider your response.  You may want to type it in a word processing program first, look it over, and then copy and paste it into a message. 

7) Be careful with humor & sarcasm: it is easy for a remark meant to be funny to be misinterpreted without the voice inflections and body language of personal communications.  If you use subtle humor, take steps to make sure the other party realize you are trying to be funny.  Use the set of symbols that net users have developed to show emotions. 

8) Don't give the other party's e-mail address to others without permission. 

;-)    wink	:-)    grin	B-)   Happy face with glasses
8-)   excited	:-*    OOPS!	:-(   sad, unhappy
0:-)   Angel	:^D   great

 

Internet-Assisted Course Homepage

English Department,

Fu Jen Univ.