Raquel Ribeiro

Hi! I’m Raquel, English teacher, Tutor at UFC Virtual and also a master’s student at UECE. If you didn't read our introduction, I'm working with my dear colleague Isabela in this blog. As we are going to talk about tutoring, I’d like to start talking a little about my experience and some personal thoughts I have as a Distance Education teacher. 
Well, I’m tutoring for almost a year now and I’ve been learning a lot with Professors and even with my students about this new modality. As a master’s student, my focus is on Multimodality in English teaching which I think it also plays an important role on teaching and learning foreign languages in distance, and personally, it’s one of the reasons for my increasing interest about Distance Education. 
I started working as a tutor last semester with written and oral subjects, but now I'm only with the oral ones. Speaking generally, being a tutor brings a lot of responsibilities, because we give support to students who live kilometers away, promoting their learning process collectively and, at the same time, developing students’ autonomy. I would say that this is harder if we talk about foreign language distance courses, because in my opinion, we have to encourage students even more, due to the difficulties most of them have to finish their studies, especially the ones from the countryside. Encouraging students is another way of avoiding the feeling of loneliness, guiding them to stay in touch with their classmates in a collaborative way, because this is also an important role on learning process. 
One of the students' difficulties really worries me, that is the belief some of them have that with a Distance course they won't have to spend long hours studying, that it will be much easier to have a Graduation degree. Sure distance courses have the facilities of online learning: you can study anytime, anywhere, just being connected, unfornatelly most of the students have little time to do their activities, which makes some of them giving up at one point. That's why, I think encouragement is so important to students to continue, guiding them to search for real practices and to be organized.
I'd like to finish saying that this new practice of my professional life has been challenging but also encouraging to increase my own potential as Distance Education teacher, but I still have much to learn as a tutor.