View Content #24644

By Isabelle Sackville-West, CASLS Fellow

Peer-to-Peer interaction provides a valuable opportunity for students to co-construct meaning, improving their communicative competence and connection to the target community. Essentially, the notion of co-construction underscores the concept that knowledge is acquired collaboratively, through social interaction. By facilitating a supportive environment in which interaction and co-construction of meaning can occur, learners are given ample opportunity to improve their language proficiency (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988). One such environment is peer tutoring. In peer tutoring, two learners are paired together. The more proficient learner mediates his/her partner’s uptake of new information (Thurston et al., 2009: 462-463). This co-construction of meaning between peers is vital to language acquisition, providing opportunity for authentic communication. Additionally, Lightbrown & Spada (2006) argue that language classrooms need to be environments that students enjoy and feel is not only interesting, but also relevant to their age and ability (64). Peer tutoring provides a means through which students learn pragmatic and sociolinguistic cues that are relevant to their age group. This is a crucial aspect of language learning that language classrooms often cannot address due to lack of time and resources.

As a Chinese Flagship student at the University of Oregon, I receive weekly peer tutoring from an expert speaker, usually an international student from Taiwan or Mainland China. For me, this opportunity has been invaluable. Currently, I am an advanced learner. As such, my struggle isn’t giving presentations or discussing politics, but rather engaging with members of the language community in normal, every-day environments. Peer tutoring provides insight on topics, slang, and current phenomena relevant to my age, helping to fill crucial gaps in my lexicon and making it easier to navigate authentic spaces both in the community and abroad. 

It is often tricky, as students, to move away from “textbook speak” and become more linguistically creative. Adapting one’s language to different contexts, learning to express one’s identity in a new language, and identifying what is pragmatically appropriate when talking with peers are all difficult skills to pin down in the classroom. Peer tutoring, along with the co-construction of meaning that it facilitates, helps students build these skills and feel comfortable pushing their language beyond the confines of their textbooks. Co-constructing meaning through peer interaction is not only an opportunity for language practice and production, but also allows learners to flesh out their linguistic repertoire and improve communicative competence in a way that is relevant to their ability and age.

References:

Lightbown, R & Spada, N. (2006). How languages are learned. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tharp, R. G. & Gallimore, R. (1988). Rousing minds to life: teaching, learning, and schooling in social context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thurston, A, Duran, D., Cunningham, E., Blanch, S & Topping, K (2009). International online reciprocal peer tutoring to promote modern language development in primary schools. Computers & Education 53(2), 462-472.