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SOME NOTIONS ON PEER INSTRUCTION IN TEACHING AND LEARNING ENGLISH Matveyeva I. A.
Matveyeva Irina Aleksandrovna - Senior Teacher, DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGES, PEDAGOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY ANDIJAN STATE MEDICAL INSTITUTE, ANDIJAN, REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN
Abstract: the partnership in education, known since Aristotle's time, has acquired new forms today. The basic concepts of this technique were reflected in the works of its founder, Harvard University professor Eric Mazur. A review of the literature on this topic, as well as our own experience in the use ofpartner education in our university, is presented in this article. Keywords: English, instruction, lesson.
Relevance of the topic. Nowadays Peer Instruction is a very popular and common method of teaching in higher school and Lesson Plan of English lessons in our institute includes such a kind of interactive work. Practical points on this subject enable us to use a great variety of class activities and this fact made us to consult available literature on this subject. Peer teaching is a suite of practices in which peers instruct each other in a purpose-driven, meaningful interaction. Many programs feature older, more experienced peers, or those with greater mastery in a subject area teaching younger, less experienced peers or those who are yet to master the skills and content of the subject area. Others organize students within a course to collaboratively notice areas or items that they do not know and then to learn and teach each other. Have being researched many scientific sources faced to pre-history of this phenomena, I want to offer the readers some facts and notions from Peer Instruction methodology created by Professor Eric Mazur, Harvard University.
Ariane Dumont HEIG-VD, Yverdon University of Applied Sciences (Switzerland) reported data from one year of teaching English for foreign students with Peer Instruction [3], a method invented and developed by Harvard Professor Eric Mazur. This interactive method partly based on collaborative work is used in various disciplines, but rarely in foreign languages. It is a student-centered approach that involves flipping the original classroom by moving information transfer out through technological support and moving application of learning into the classroom. Our observations indicate increased student mastery of both use of English and conceptual reasoning accompanied with an increase in self-esteem. We also discuss how we have improved our implementation in one year of practice. We have focused in class common language practice exercise with pre-class written responses using wikis as a support for the tasks and as a mean of communication between students and teacher. The authors showed how to foster college students getting
deeply engaged in learning a foreign language using a collaborative method of teaching called Peer Instruction [3]. The study is about a student-centered approach involving flipping the classroom. The concept of flipping the classroom could be summed up accordingly, firstly transfer of knowledge occurs outside the classroom, and indeed students receive the material to learn prior to the course. Then the assimilation of knowledge and new concepts takes place afterwards in the classroom. In this short article, we show the results of a year of flipping a classroom for engineering students learning English as a foreign language.
As a result of flipping the classroom, the students had to work new subjects prior to the classroom through a discovery approach, their homework was not graded, but their effort in doing them was, giving them a bonus at the end of the year. As a first step, we used to assign a reading, video, or activity for students to complete outside of class that introduces our students to the new concept or idea. It may be interesting to create one's own video lesson for them to watch. Homework was given electronically, mostly through emails. It may consist of a variety of tasks such as answering questions, annotating a text through a wiki such as framapad, watching videos, creating an online wiki document or even giving feedbacks. Homework must be sent to the professor at least one day before the class meeting in order to let the professor acknowledge the encountered problems and mistakes to be dealt with during the class session.. The use of Framapad as a wiki allows the professor to follow each student's contribution and the history of all the changes in the document. This information is relevant to organize the class teaching to let students assimilate new concepts based on what they worked on before the class meeting [4]. Soliciting feedback from students on coverage activity require them to respond to one conceptually based question which students can get right if they have done their homework. Professor Eric Mazur suggests asking a feedback question such as: 'What did you find most confusing or difficult about what you read, watched, wrote? Students' answers will allow pointing out at common misconceptions or misunderstandings about the concept and giving material to the classroom teaching. Writing effective questions for fostering deep learning may not be an easy task. We have been using a prompt cycle developed at Harvard [4] pertaining to the chosen concept. In the first prompt, we focus on what students indicated as having difficulty understanding. In the second prompt, we focus on what students must be able to do or to know. In the third prompt, we concentrate about what students often misunderstand about the concept, have difficulty with, or incorrectly think. Eventually, we have elicited the kind of questions aimed at solving the misunderstandings, difficulties or misconceptions mentioned by students in their feedbacks. Most of class time in a PI course is spent interacting with questions, called Concep Tests[4]. It is needed to define a way to deliver and collect student responses to these questions. Decide if you want to go low-tech or hightech to pose questions in class. Either way works. "It's not the technology, it's the pedagogy," says Eric Mazur, the Harvard Professor founder of the method. At Yverdon University of Applied Sciences, we opted for the use of clickers and the technology of turning point, but we could have chosen to use flashcards or an online website called learning catalytics and developed by Professor Mazur and his group. Peer Instruction can be used with any topic, concept, or idea; it has appeared that in our practice that it was relevant to ask grammar questions, language base concepts about writing and levels of language ie formal versus informal language. Questions that work the best are usually those that address concepts or ideas students find tricky, difficult, or often misunderstand and are key to deep understanding of the subject. For each concept, idea or topic that we wanted to implement with our engineering students learning English as a foreign language, we first used to set the stage and give a brief presentation to put the concept in context. The questions posed about the concepts are called ConcepTests [3]. Knowledge transfer questions where students have to apply what they have just learned are extremely efficient in language learning.
The methodology of Peer Instruction is based on polling students and challenging about their answers. First, a question called ConcepTest is posed to students, they are then given time to think about their answer individually. Poll students to respond using clickers or flashcards. The next nest is to ask students to find a peer with a different answer and convince them of their response, this step is the heart of the Peer Instruction method. Letting students explain to each other and obliging them to make a choice accordingly. Finally, students are polled again and the professor who provides closure explaining the correct answer or asking for students' volunteers analyzes feedback. The cycle is then repeated [3]. We observed a rise of intrinsic motivation during our Peer Instruction classes, which resulted in a high level of attending students, and very positive comments from the students at the moment of teaching and in their evaluation feedbacks. To measure our students' learning experience and satisfaction, we have analyzed students' feedbacks on the English course taught with wikis and Peer Instruction. Research shows that students' feedback are relevant to state about their learning experience and satisfaction [2, 5] and hence provides a tool for measuring certain aspects of teaching quality. As a result, we observe an exceptional high rate of satisfaction for our teaching. We report a 61% of participation to the evaluation, which is too low a score to reflect an objective feedback. In classes whose number is below 30 students, we should have an 80% of participation to reflect an objective situation [1]. Nevertheless, as students expressed themselves directly during the class session and afterwards by email, we state very positive attitudes towards this English class and assume that the obtained results in the feedback show a generalized trend among all students.
The above-discussed method of teaching provides schools teaching foreign languages with a context to use technologies in learning environments. Indeed, students can practice the use of wikis for their learning experience, they also have the opportunity to extend, and practice previously acquired skills such as you-tube, discovering new perspectives in educational settings allowing co-construction of knowledge and communication. Moreover, as students are aware that what their written production will be read by other students, kept online and possibly graded by their professor, the get more seriously involved in the activity. Above all, what is particularly impactful in a collaborative approach of learning is that students adapt their discourse, language and explanations to convince their peers. Being able to explain a subject to fellow students requires a high level of comprehension and capitalize a high level of retention. These elements increase not only intrinsic motivation but also the quality of the collaborative product and thus produce a high level of satisfaction. Furthermore, as a result, the objectives of the course are fully attained and students' learning experience is optimized. Nevertheless, teachers report a very high level of personal investment in the preparation of their teaching, they also mention the difficulty of finding appropriate and relevant Concept Test based on the pre-class assignments. It has been observed that a high level of motivation and energy is required from a professor willing to use wikis for collaborative students work prior to the teaching and peer instruction for the assimilation of the concepts in class. Furthermore, certain aspects of the assignments might be improved as some collaborative products evolved in too many ramifications, which prevented students from a global perception.
The results from one year of teaching English for foreign students with wikis and Peer Instruction are very encouraging. Indeed, this interactive method based on collaborative work proves to be effective in teaching foreign languages. Teaching a foreign language through a student-centered approach involving flipping the original classroom by moving information transfer out through technological support and moving application of learning into the classroom is rather uncommon. Our observations indicate increased student mastery of both use of English and critical thinking and writing accompanied with an increase in self-esteem. Even if the model might be improved, teaching common language practice exercise with pre-class written responses using wikis as a support for the collaborative tasks proves to be motivating and enhancing satisfaction at the same time. Our observations show
that this method help students learn more from pre-class homework and increase student intrinsic motivation. Moreover, students report a higher engagement in the discussions with their peers. Research has demonstrated the effectiveness of peer instruction for sciences and humanities, but not yet for foreign languages.
This study proves that Peer Instruction associated with the use of wikis enhance effectiveness in collaborative pre-class work over more traditional teaching methods. Students' ratings have shown a significant higher level of satisfaction after one semester of peer instruction teaching method and teachers are highly motivated to pursue the experience despite the amount of work.
During "English in Medicine" lessons in ASMI, we use this method in any stage of the class. It helps to intensify the educational process and elicit medical students to go ahead in their learning medical English. I think this method will be developed further in language teaching practice and it is worth to be the point of future scientific research.
References
1. Centra J.A., 1993. Reflective faculty evaluation: enhancing teaching and determining faculty effectiveness. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.
2. Marsh C.J., 1997. Key concepts for understanding curriculum. London; Washington, Falmer Press.
3. Mazur E., 1997. Peer instruction: a user's manual. Upper Saddle River, N.J., Prentice Hall.
4. Schell J., 2013. "blog.peerinstruction.net Turn to your neighbour."
5. Wolff D. and Marsh D., 2007. Diverse contexts, converging goals: CLIL in Europe. Frankfurt, Peter Lang.
