Abstract
Focussing on a project carried out within the scope of an English Applied to Tourism course, this chapter describes a teaching and learning strategy, putting forward the underlying rationale and outlining its design, implementation, and assessment phases. The project, whose aims included fostering students' language and critical thinking skills, challenged Hotel Management students to collaborate to produce online training modules for their peers. Relying on the use of digital technologies, most particularly LMS, and cloud-based student engagement and graphic design tools (including Nearpod and Canva), these modules were peer-reviewed and implemented, with students acting as both facilitators and reviewers. Building on existing research on the affordances of peer learning within the scope of foreign language teaching, the author frames the different activities, reflecting on how peer learning strategies can enhance students' engagement and agency, offering insights that can support English for Specific Purposes (ESP) teachers, as well as other practitioners.
TopBackground
Defined as “students learning from and with each other in both formal and informal ways” (Boud, 2001, p. 4), peer learning can be described as “the acquisition of knowledge and skills through active helping and support among peers who are equals in standing or matched companion” (Gogus, 2012). Rooted in Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1962) and the construct of learning as social and cultural process that “occurs through meaningful negotiation and interaction between learners” (Rahimi, 2013, p. 67), peer learning is an “active and constructive process” (Keerthirathne, 2020, p. 1) that can be used in a wide range of settings, with different objectives, using different strategies and tools. That being so, even though it has been an extensively used educational practice, the way it is perceived and applied has evolved, as a result of multiple challenges and changes, most particularly, the development and widespread use of learning technologies and platforms (Jeong et al., 2020; Lin et al., 2016).
Considered to reinforce “the new roles assigned to educational actors”, in that teachers are increasingly perceived as facilitators, whereas students become “a worker, self-directed learner, and teacher” (Carvalho & Santos, 2022, p. 3), within the scope of peer learning, digital technologies have come to play both a functional and paradigm-shifting role (Carvalho & Santos, 2022; Chen, 2021; Tang et al., 2022).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Project-Based Learning (PBL): A student-centred approach that implies the development of a project oriented towards the solution of a real-world problem/ challenge, with the teachers acting as facilitators, responsible for engaging students in building their own learning.
Rubrics: Set of instructions and quality descriptors used as means of communicating assessment standards and criteria between students and instructors, paticularly when structuring peer-evaluation. Despite the wide acceptance of rubrics, their impact is considered to be under-explored.
English for Specific Purposes (ESP): A division of English as a Foreign Language, refering to the teaching of English that focuses on terminology and developing communicative skills in a particular field or occupation. ESP courses are designed to meet specific needs of the learners, with reference to the particular vocabulary and register required in their field of studies.
Nearpod: online learning and presentation platform that combines interactive activities (such as quizzes and interactive videos) with content delivery, both synchronously and asynchronously. The platform can be used to implement assessment activities and is compatible with multiple applications.
Student Agency: Student agency refers to students’ active and responsive involvement in both learning and assessment practices, as opposed to more traditional, lecture driven approaches. The concept implies that students are engaged in a process of looking for (rather than just receiving) feedback from different sources and at different times, crosscutting it with their own experience and context, and using it to make informed and independent choices regarding their learning.
Constructive Feedback: the provision of prompt and timely reviews or learning suggestions, based on specific tasks or assignments. It involves the identification of problem areas, encouraging questioning, and possible suggestions and/or solutions. This feedback can be measured and facilitated by the use of digital tools.