Overwhelmingly, students enjoy CBL and think that it enhances their learning. The empirical data taken as a whole are inconclusive as to the effects on learning compared with other types of activity. Teachers enjoy CBL, partly because it engages, and is perceived to motivate, students. CBL seems to foster learning in small groups though whether this is the case delivery or the group learning effect is unclear.
What factors in individualized tutoring sessions impact university students' self-efficacy for mastering a foreign language (FL)? For 29 initial sessions (Italian, Spanish, French, or Portuguese) at a university tutoring program, tutees completed pretutoring and posttutoring questionnaires indicating their self-efficacy for learning the FL. Transcripts of the 4 sessions with the greatest increases and the 4 with greatest decreases in self-efficacy were analyzed and compared for features, including session length, amount of overlapped speech, ratio of tutor/tutee talk, language choice, questioning, rules, examples, statements about the FL, admissions of error and of lack of knowledge by the tutor, and attributional statements. Motivationally effective tutoring sessions tended to be shorter, to focus on deeper understanding of the FL structure through explanation of rules and deep-level questioning, and to characterize and model the FL as learnable and regular.STUDENTS STRUGGLING WITH A FOREIGN language (FL) course often turn to outside resources such as individualized tutoring to help them with homework and language learning. For instance, at the university where the present study took place, FLs were the third most commonly tutored topic in the tutorial center, behind math and chemistry. Such tutoring-which has a strong record of success in promoting content mastery across numerous domains (Bloom, 1984;Cohen, Kulik, & Kulik, 1982)-can be especially promising for students who feel uncertain of their likelihood of success in languages. However, we know very little about the contexts and outcomes of FL tutoring. Except for some characterizations of English-as-a-second-language (ESL) writing con-
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.