Abstract

Higher education institutions are experiencing a dramatic increase in immigrant students who come from a variety of cultural, linguistic and educational backgrounds. Their educational needs may be more complex than locally educated students. In order to provide high quality education, educators are experimenting with new teaching strategies to address the challenges of their diverse learning needs. In culturally diverse classes, language-related challenges have proved to be a significant factor in hampering student academic success. Difficulties with scholarly writing and critical thinking have been documented in a broad range of academic programs in English speaking countries. In particular, adult immigrant students such as health care professionals have found academic writing to be a new and unexpected challenge. Writing skills such as referencing, correct use of grammar and originality have proven to be most difficult. This paper will report on a project designed to support immigrant student nurses to complete higher education through the provision of online writing tutoring. Although online learning forums have been used extensively in higher education, there has been less attention to the use of virtual, one to one tutorial support. The results illustrate that online tutoring provides the opportunity to tailor these sessions to individual student needs in a timely and flexible manner. This online strategy has been shown to be effective in increasing students’ confidence with technical writing skills and use of learning technology.