1. Runningheader:USINGCOMMUNICATION QUALITIESIN YOUR TUTORING SESSIONS: HOWTO BECOME
A BETTER SPEAKER AND LISTENER 1
Using Communication Qualities in Your Tutoring Sessions:
How to Become a Better Speaker and Listener
Crystal Holdefer
East Carolina University

2. USING COMMUNICATION QUALITIES IN YOUR TUTORING SESSIONS:HOWTO BECOME A BETTER
SPEAKERANDLISTENER 2
Introduction
Imagine the following scenario:
You’ve just begun your shift at the University Writing Center when a student comes in to ask for
your help with her narrative. Her narrative assignment is to choose a specific piece of text and
talk about how it has significantly affected her life. She tells you that she’s chosen to write about
the book MaximumRide by James Patterson,but the problem is that she doesn’t remember
anything about the book. You then spend the majority of the session trying to get her to remember
what she can about the book (characters,plot, how it made her feel, etc.),but the most you can
get out of her is a few “I don’t know” and one “I liked the characters.”
This exact situation happened to me the first semester I tutored at the University Writing Center. I tried
multiple strategies to get her to talk about the book, but she only replied that she couldn’t remember and
that she didn’t know what to say. I also had the same problem when I tried to get her to talk about her
paper because the text had affected her at a bad time in her life and she didn’t want to discuss it. That
session felt like a failure to me, and for a long time I thought that the problem was with the student.
However, as I reflected back on the experience, I realized that my communication with the student hadn’t
gone as well as I’d thought.
What Went Wrong
Dan Huston (2010) includes a long list of qualities for effective communication in his book
Communicating Mindfully: Mindfulness-Based Communication and Emotional Intelligence to help people
become better speakers and listeners. Some of the qualities mentioned for becoming a better speaker are
“[satisfy] other’s needs,“[keep] the conversation going,” and “[be] [t]ruthful,” and some of the qualities
mentioned to become a better listener are “[g]et physically and mentally ready to listen,” [m]ake shift
from speaker and listener complete,” and “[h]ear the person fully before reacting” (Huston, 2010, p. 74).
When I thought back on my session, I realized that the only qualities that I had used were to be truthful
and to hear the other person speak fully before reacting. I also realized that I had spent the majority of the
time satisfying my own needs (to get the student to remember the book), doing most of the talking, and
filling in our gaps of silence with more questions. When I thought of my behavior this way, it made sense
as to why the student didn’t respond as much as I wanted her to. My poor communication (self-
satisfaction and talkativeness) led to her poor communication (under responsiveness) and that resulted in
an unsuccessfulcollaboration.
Why Communication Skills Are Importantfor Collaboration
Tutoring sessions involve a lot of talking back and forth with the student, and poor communication habits
can get in the way of successfully engaging with the student and getting him or her to participate in the
session. As tutors it’s important to figure out how to balance our roles as speakers and listeners in
sessions (talking half the time and listening half the time) in order to can get across our ideas to the
students, while also showing them that we’re there to let them talk and to listen to their ideas. However,in
order to become better speakers and listeners in your sessions, you must first know how to apply these
communication qualities to them. To start off, we’ll discuss how tutors can use the three previously
mentioned speaking communication qualities.

3. USING COMMUNICATION QUALITIES IN YOUR TUTORING SESSIONS:HOWTO BECOME A BETTER
SPEAKERANDLISTENER 3
How To Use The Three Speaking Communication Qualities
Satisfy the Student’s Needs
The first quality mentioned for better speakers is to satisfy others’ needs,which means to consider what
the other person wants from the conversation. As a tutor, this means starting the session by figuring out
what the student wants you to pay attention to or what they want your help with. One of the ways that you
can do this is by asking them some general questions such as:
 Do you want me to pay attention to certain things as you/I read through?
 Do you feel better about some parts of your paper more than others?
 Are you having more trouble with one section of your paper?
 Is there anything in your paper that you’re concerned about?
Asking the students these questions and focusing on these problems during the session can then show the
student that you want to hear from them and that the point of the session is to fulfill their goals rather than
your own. Students may then be more open to participating in the session because they’re getting the
exact help that they require. This kind of strategy works in sessions were the student knows what they
want to have looked at, but even if you have a student that doesn’t know this information, setting a goal at
the beginning of the session can help the student tell you what areas are more important to them than
others.
Engage With the Student
The second quality mentioned for better speakers is to keep the conversation going,which means to find
ways to involve the other person in the conversation. As tutors, we don’t want to be the only ones talking
during the session and so we want to try to find different ways to get the student involved. One of the
most widely discussed ways is to use open-ended “questions” to get longer responses from the student
(Brooks, 2011, p. 131). Yet, sometimes students have trouble answering our questions because they don’t
understand what we’re trying to say. In these cases,you can try explaining the problem in more than one
way.
For example, I recently had a student who was using APA citations incorrectly in his paper. He was
quoting the information correctly, but he was placing the quotations after his citation rather than before it.
When I asked him about this error, it only confused him, and so instead I decided to show him what I
meant by drawing it out. I drew a rectangle to represent a page in his book (which I told him) and then I
added the quotation and the citation inside. Next I pointed to the citation and asked him, “You didn’t get
the citation from this page, right?” After a moment what I had been trying to say clicked for him and he
was able to understand his error. By using different types of explanations in our session, we can keep the
student engaged by getting them more interested in how to solve the problems in their paper and by
giving them better ways to remember those solutions.
Be Honest About the Student’s Paper
The third quality mentioned for better speakers is to be truthful, which mostly means engaging in honest
interaction with another person. Being honest with your tutoring comments may not be difficult, but
deciding how to phrase your comments can be.
For example, I used to have a hard time giving negative comments because I worried about how the
student would feel, and that made me give more positive comments and sugarcoat the negative ones.
However,by doing this I learned that I wasn’t really helping the student because I wasn’t giving them the

4. USING COMMUNICATION QUALITIES IN YOUR TUTORING SESSIONS:HOWTO BECOME A BETTER
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feedback that they needed to hear (which was how a reader would respond to their paper). Since then, I’ve
learned that being honest with students can help them discover the problems that their reader would have
and that many students appreciate honesty because they like to find out what other people think of their
paper. Now that you’ve learned how to use these three speaking communication qualities in your session,
we’ll move on to how to use the three previously mentioned listening communication qualities.
How To Use The Three Listening Communication Qualities
Show the Student That You’re Listening
The first two qualities for better listeners get physically and mentally ready to listen and make the shift
from speaker and listener complete both refer to focusing on the speaker and showing that you’re
listening. As tutors then, one of the best ways to show the student that we’re listening is through our body
language. Huston (2010) describes body language as “nonverbal behavior,” in which other people infer
what we’re thinking or feeling by what we’re doing with our bodies. He also adds that “[a]ltering your
nonverbals to really show others you are listening to them can change the entire atmosphere of a
conversation” (p. 132). This quote suggests that we can positively influence how the student feels when
they’re speaking by using certain body language. Huston then goes on to add that some of this body
language is “leaning back in your chair a bit to show that you’re not going anywhere,or . . . leaning
forward a bit to show that you are fully engaged,” which can make the other person feel more positive
about you. Using these behaviors to show the student that you are listening may also lead to the student
reciprocating these behaviors when they’re listening, and that can make you feelmore positive about
them as well.
Wait For the Student to Finish Speaking
The third quality mentioned for better listeners is to hear the person fully before reacting,which means
to not react as soon as there is a pause in the conversation. Huston (2010) describes the importance of
understanding pauses in conversations by saying, “If we hope to have meaningful conversations, it is
important to remind ourselves that just because someone has paused to collect his or her thoughts, does
not mean that person is done speaking” (p. 105). As tutors, we may have students who have trouble
explaining their answers to us, but rather than see their struggle as an opportunity to ask more specific
questions, it is important to see if they have something to say.
Instead, sometimes the best strategy is to let the student know that we’re ready to listen (such as by
leaning back in our chair) and then give them a little time to gather their thoughts. Muriel Harris (2005)
describes this as “Let[ting] that person process what is being said and leav[ing] some quiet time . . . to
think about your question” (p. 30). I’ve used this strategy in my own sessions when the student and I
have gotten stuck on a certain problem and I have learned that giving the student that extra quiet time not
only increases the chance that they’ll be able to figure out the answer on their own, but also gives both of
you a chance to relax and separate from each other (which can also lower your stress).
Conclusion
Now that you’ve learned how to apply these communication qualities to your tutoring session you have a
much larger chance to experience better collaboration with your student. These communication qualities
can greatly help you, but some of them may take more practice than others in order for you to use them
comfortably in your session. Therefore,don’t worry if you find yourself struggling to use all of them, and
instead focus on the ones that you like and the ones that you think could be the most useful for you.
Overall, these qualities can help you understand how you communicate in your session and that may
leave you feeling more satisfied and fulfilled by the end of it.

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References
Brooks, J. (2011) Minimalist tutoring: Making the student do all the work. In C. Murphy & S. Sherwood
(Eds.), The St. Martin’sSourcebook for Writing Consultants (pp. 128–132). Boston, NY:
Bedford/St. Martins.
Harris, M. (2005). Talk to me: Engaging reluctant writers. In B. Rafoth (Ed.), A tutor's guide: Helping
writers one to one,(pp. 23–33). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers.
Huston, D. (2010). Communicating mindfully: Mindfulness-based communication and emotional
intelligence. (5th
ed.). United States:Cengage Learning.