| Body | By Logan Matz, CASLS Fellow
Reciprocal Peer Tutoring (RPT) is a useful tool that allows learners to use their peers as sources of information. This activity helps build a stronger classroom community by having learners take responsibility for their learning and increase learner agency.
Objectives: Students will be able to:
- Identify key information in a problem
- Use learned knowledge to assist each other
- Appraise peers’ solutions and judge usefulness of solution
Modes: Any, depending on the peer tutoring sessions
Materials needed: Notebook, textbook for reference (if using), handout
Procedure:
- Introduce the topic of problem solving. Point out that for this activity, students will be working with their peers to help tackle challenging language functions they may have been struggling with.
- Students pair off. The structure of this is variable. If your classroom has a naturally-occurring group of more advanced learners and one of less advanced learners, this is a good time to match a higher-level and lower-level student in a pair group. If your classroom is more heterogeneous in ability, random pairing is fine.
- Explain that each student in the pair will get a chance to help and be helped with a function they’ve been struggling with. This can include:
- Comparing and contrasting
- Persuading
- Asking questions
- Expressing likes/dislikes
- Cause and effect
- Summarizing
- Sequencing
- Predicting
- Agreeing/disagreeing
- Etc.
- Have each pair choose a person to start at random.
- The starting student should then think of three questions related to what they have been struggling with. For example, if their chosen function is asking questions, they could ask their partner, “What is something I should avoid when asking questions?” or “When I ask a question, am I being polite enough?”
- The second student then takes on the role of tutor, attempting to solve or help with the issue of the first student. If the peer tutor doesn’t know where to begin, they can use the Peer Tutor Handout to get started. It lists a few questions to try and break out of a rut if both tutor and tutee are stuck.
- After pairs have had a chance to work through a problem, students will switch roles and repeat steps 4-5.
- After both students in each pair have had a chance to perform both roles, the teacher can bring the class back to a group discussion. Pairs will share problems and solutions. If any students were stuck (i.e. their tutors were unable to come up with a solution), the pair can share how they worked through the handout. After that, this is the time for the whole class to offer suggestions. The teacher should try to let students take charge of the discussion and provide input only when necessary.
Notes: This activity is highly flexible to adapt to not only varying proficiency levels but also learner backgrounds. Most foreign language classrooms will have higher-proficient and lower-proficient non-native speakers. However, if you have a certain number of expert and non-expert speakers in the class, those two groups can be mixed together during pairing. This allows the expert speakers (heritage learners, more advanced learners, etc.) to provide tutoring and assistance from an intuition standpoint, while the non-expert speakers provides an external viewpoint from which to examine features of the L2. Overall, the focus should be on meaning making, so that neither student gets discouraged or bogged down by grammatical precision.
|
|---|
