Peer Teaching and Learner-Generated Materials: Introducing Students to New Roles

This paper reports on a classroom teaching project in which Japanese university students were asked to produce and teach a thirty-minute lesson in English based around a research topic of their own choice. It explores the feasibility of making students responsible for creating teaching materials and describes the scaffolded assistance given to the students to train them into the role of teacher. The paper reports on the participants’ positive reactions to the teaching project, as reflected in questionnaire responses, and presents examples of student-generated teaching materials. Learner-centered curricula allow students to make decisions about the content of their courses and how those courses are taught (Nunan, 1988). The project that is the subject of this paper took place in a course where students were given the responsibility to design and teach their own English language materials. Students created their goals and objectives, a level of learnercenteredness that Nunan (1995, p. 138) rated as relatively high on a scale of implementation. Scharle and Szabo, discussing learner autonomy, pointed out the benefits of granting learners a high degree of independence: “For one, learners can only assume responsibility for their own learning if they have some control over the learning process. For another, increasing independence may evoke and reinforce responsible and autonomous attitudes” (2000, p. 80). Even so, Scharle and Szabo (2000) and Nunan (1995) cautioned that learner independence does not come automatically and that learners need training and guidance to adapt to new classroom roles. Literature Review The Context of the Study Such caution is relevant in the Japanese context. High schools in particular still feel pressure to prepare students for Japan’s notoriously demanding university entrance exams; because these exams do not test oral communication skills, the wash-back effect means that most classes are teacher-fronted, concentrating on the written language and the deductive teaching of grammar (Sakui, 2004). Learners in such a system have little experience in taking charge of their own learning. When they reach the tertiary level, however, they may gain some experience, since, as Language Education in Asia, 2012, 3(2), 230-242. http://dx.doi.org/10.5746/LEiA/12/V3/I2/A11/Mennim Language Education in Asia, Volume 3, Issue 2, 2012 Mennim Page 231 Hadley (1999) pointed out, Japanese universities enjoy more freedom to implement innovative courses and curricula that address the communicative deficit in high schools. The peer-teaching project in this study took place at a private Japanese university within a general, obligatory oral English course. The aim of the course was the development of fluency and experience in a range of oral communication styles. Although the participants were first-year law majors, this course did not focus on legal English (a legal English course can be taken as an elective) but on general conversational English; it dealt with a wide range of contemporary topics. A major course component required students to contribute their own classroom content through a research project. They investigated a topic of their choice and reported the results to the class in English. In the first semester, the report stage was an oral presentation in which students gave a largely scripted speech and responded to questions afterward. In the second semester, the report stage was a lesson, with content-based questions, devised and taught by the students. To introduce the rationale behind the teaching project, a brief discussion of L2 oral presentations follows. Advantages and Disadvantages of L2 Oral Presentations Oral presentations give students an opportunity to use the L2 for communicative purposes and to find ways to present relevant and easily understandable information (Legutke & Thomas, 1991). Researching the content of the presentations also promotes critical thinking and gives students collaboration experience (Morita, 2000). However, McCafferty and Ford (2000) pointed out that there are disadvantages associated with presentations as well, e.g., passive listening from audience members, a focus on correctness by speakers, memorization, and non-communicativeness. Some teachers might not view all of these features as negative (particularly a focus on correctness) but may still share McCafferty and Ford’s concern that classroom presentations can become stale and thus not reach their full potential as a communicative event. Yang (2010), for example, reports from her study of Chinese students in Canada that “in giving oral presentations, ESL students, especially those less fluent in English, tended to restrict the extemporaneous elements in their speeches and speak from their memory of a written text” (2010, p. 14). Legutke and Thomas (1991) stress the importance of overcoming these shortcomings and suggest that when a presentation becomes a “tedious verbatim account” (p. 276) that leaves the audience inattentive, then knowledge is not shared and the information gathered essentially becomes useless. To avoid this outcome, they suggest encouraging students to adopt new classroom roles and utilize skills more usually associated with the teacher, including preparation of support material, task design, and even the management of skill training. This suggests a classroom event rather different from the oral presentations familiar to most teachers. Instead, a report stage where students devise content to teach their research topic might be imagined. The Concept of Students as Teachers At first glance, transforming students into teachers may seem challenging. However, the literature, briefly sampled here, demonstrates that encouraging students to take on teacher roles and make contributions to L2 lessons is an already well-established trend.