Here are some helpful tips we've compliled about tutoring teaching. We hope they prove useful.

Circle stories
This activity has the motivational element of students not knowing exactly what the entire composition they help write will look like. The results are often funny and can generate a lot of speaking.

Give a piece of paper to each student. An instruction is then read to the students who must write down from their own experience or imagination the result of that instruction. The student then folds over the top of the page to cover the line they have written and then they pass it to the person on their left. The next instruction is then read by the teacher and the students write down the result, fold it over and pass it round again. Eventually, the piece of paper will end up with the person who first wrote on it. Students then open the paper and read the complete 'story'.

As an alternative, the teacher dictates small parts of a story and then the student completes the descriptions the teacher leaves out. The student then passes the paper to the person next to them who doesn't turn it over, but continues the dictation and then supplies another missing part.

Here's an example:
"One day a young boy went to? Where did he go? Pass the paper round?
He crossed the street and saw a? What did he see?? Who was dressed? How was he/she/it dressed?? Pass the paper round?" and so on.
Correcting written work
When a student hands in a piece of written work and you mark it, correcting the mistakes and giving them back, how much do your students actually learn from all the time you've spent with a red pen in your hand? Probably not a lot. This is certainly true of my Spanish written work. When I got it back, I really only wanted to know that I'd done okay. Yes, of course I made a note to go over the mistakes and write them down in a written errors book, but I never quite got round to it. What a waste. Surely, it's better to get the students to mark their own work from hints given by you as to their mistakes.

One quick way to do this is to read through their work and, instead of marking where the problems lie, just put a number next to each line, the number corresponding to the number of mistakes the student has made in that line. The student will then get back their composition with no red through it, just numbers down the margin. They must then spend five minutes checking through and re-reading their work, making corrections as they recognize them. It’s much easier to find a mistake in a line of text if you know there is one there. There are two main benefits to be gained from doing this:

1. Students spend mental energy proof-reading their texts, helping them notice their common mistakes, those they make time after time. This, if done often enough, will make them think about these mistakes whilst writing, so that hopefully they can be avoided during the writing as opposed to being noticed during the checking.

2. Teachers can distinguish between errors made because the student was lazy or sloppy and errors which need tackling in class because the student really didn't know the structure they attempted.

In exams where accurate writing skills are of benefit, this guided self-correction can be invaluable in improving students' written work.

Helpful tips for busy teachers, arranged by skill
Grammar
Vocabulary
Reading Comprehension
Listening Comprehension
Writing
Speaking
Pronunciation