Peer Groups in the Esl Classroom: a Controlled Experiment

Abstract

After teaching freshman composition for one semester, I felt that the experience had on the whole been successful. But there had also been those days when I had looked out on rows of frozen faces--immobile aside from an occasional yawn. As a consequence, I began to look for1a way to liven up the class and to increase the students' involvement with the subject material. I happened to come across DeVries and Slavin's articles over peer teaching. The concept seemed to have potential, and I began using the technique on a limited basis the following semester. The students responded enthusiastically, and I became convinced that the technique had merit. Moreover, I found that this type of instruction was especially helpful in ESL classes, where there is a wide variation in language skills among the students. In these classes particularly, peer teaching provided a way to give specialized attention and tutoring to weak students and to eliminate the boredom experienced by the better students. Intuitively, I felt that peer teaching was superior to traditional lecture/discussion teaching methods. There were, however, very few studies verifying the actual effects of peer teaching on academic performance. Therefore, the experiment documented in this thesis was designed to test the feasibility of peer teaching, and to determine its effect on academic achievement.