Instructions as components of the educational function of an online tutor

Our research finds its roots in the PrepaFLE project, an online tutored French training program which aims to prepare Japanese students before their arrival in France. This program was developed at the Center of Applied Linguistics (CLA) of the University of Franche-Comte in 2011 by a teaching unit in the Master degree of French as a Foreign Language. This teaching unit gave CLA students the opportunity to play the role of tutor in a 60 hour training course designed to prepare students from Tokyo's Aoyama University for their upcoming year of study in France. Through this program we were able to study the characteristics of the tutorial functions deployed by Master Program students by analyzing their interactions with Japanese students. Our work is aided by research focused on tutoring functions identified by teachers in online course work (Quintin 2008, Nissen 2011). Our analysis has shown that tutors use four tutoring methods (educational, socio-emotional, organizational, and technical) which are characterized by different types of interventions. The interventions studied here will be those of the educational method, the instructions of which we will establish a typology below.