A study of international student mentors’ participation in a college English conversation mentoring program in Korea

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of mentoring participation of international student mentors in a college English conversation mentoring program in Korea. For the study, 5 international students participated in the English conversation camp as mentors, while 20 Korean students participated in the camp as mentees for 2 weeks. The mentoring program for international student mentors has set for both of mentors and mentees to develop the core competencies such as communicative competency, self-development competency and global competency. The effect of mentoring participation of international student mentors was investigated by mentors' daily reports, reflection papers and pre and post surveys. The mentors’ daily reports were summarized by Word Cloud and showed that international student mentors spent most of mentoring time by doing ‘presentation practice’, ‘cultural exchange activity’ and ‘English pronunciation practice’ for mentees. The survey results indicated that both of mentors and mentees showed the high satisfaction on a mentoring program. International student mentors also mentioned their English competence in speaking has been developed by mentoring participation. In addition, the survey on core competency of participants showed the increase of global competence, communicative competence and self-development competence. The further pedagogical implication is discussed in the study.