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COLLEGE and university foreign language instruction has long acknowledged that students do not get enough practice speaking the languages they are attempting to acquire. On-campus solutions to the problem are few. New language-acquisition technology is becoming more interactive, but it will be some time before computers have the resources and sensitivities of conversation partners. The increasing internationalization of many college campuses, however, makes it feasible to use student native speakers to remedy this shortcoming in our technologies. This article describes an experiment at Bentley College in using work-study peer tutors for individualized proficiency-oriented practice.
Theoretical justifications for a program of tutor-student interactions abound. Foreign Service Institute figures show that 720 hours of classroom time are required for a student of average aptitude to obtain a 2+ rating in oral skills in French (Omaggio 21). The elementary-intermediate two-year sequence at Bentley College supplies a maximum of 140 classroom hours, distributed in two 75-minute instructional periods a week. An institution that offers 4 hours a week provides approximately 180 hours in two years. In all undergraduate institutions, then, a serious gap exists between the expectations of the language programs (to bring students to an advanced level of proficiency in two years) and the resources allotted to the task, even if we add a variable amount of out-of-class exposure in the language lab. At Bentley it would require over ten years of study at our current rates to match the FSI estimate of the classroom hours needed to achieve advanced proficiency.
To those of us involved in the teaching of foreign languages, none of this is news. Most students in advanced foreign language courses in our universities have flawed intermediate skills at best, the exceptions being those with bilingual backgrounds and those who have spent a significant amount of time abroad. Developments in methodology have pointed to a partial solution to this problem. For example, an emphasis on interaction is increasing communicative language use by students in classrooms, through paired and group work (Rivers). Nevertheless, it seems likely that even twenty structured minutes with a tutor would be far richer in both production opportunities and accessible input than would several hours of classroom time. Stephen Krashen specifically cites “interaction with a native speaker who is motivated to try to help the second language acquirer understand, and who is genuinely interested in the acquirer as a person” as having “maximum impact on subconscious acquisition” (163).
Language-acquisition research clearly indicates that relaxed and motivated students acquire second languages mainly through comprehensible input and through speaking opportunities of various kinds and that the correction of mistakes has very little relevance to student progress. In discussing the application of language-acquisition research to teaching practice, Elaine Horwitz specifically and repeatedly cites the benefits to the student of practicing with native speakers. Her concluding statements seem to bring this suggestion even more strongly to the fore: “Teaching practices consistent with these principles stress the development of listening and reading comprehension, participation in lifelike conversational activities, and contact with natural instances of the target language” (689). Tutor-student interaction is potentially the single richest source of the sort of foreign language experience that is currently believed to lead to acquisition.
Bentley College has characteristics that form an essential backdrop for our peer-tutoring program:
In 1985 Kitzie McKinney, chair of the Modern Language Department, established the learning center for languages at Bentley College. Her hope was that the center would become a focus of cross-cultural exchange between American students of foreign languages and student conversation partners from other countries. Some twenty booths were installed along the sides of the largest room of the center, leaving an open space for group and one-on-one meetings. The administration approved a $7,000 work-study budget. Tutors were hired to do traditional lab tasks (mostly tape copying and distribution) and to help student learners in ways that were to be determined. Initially most students came in to borrow tapes or to work in the booths, as in a traditional language lab. Activities involving tutors were left to the individual teachers or initiated in response to student requests, with limited results. Before 1987 each student met with a tutor less than once a semester on average (0.6 times).
With my arrival as director of the learning center in 1987, the department began to move toward a more structured approach to tutor-student interaction. We were aware that much tutor work took the form of last-minute help for floundering students. We decided to attempt a systematic, positive integration of the tutors into course planning by instituting a requirement of four tutor sessions each semester for every student in the first two years of study. The students were to make appointments by telephone or in person to ensure tutor availability and to establish attendance records. The professors were asked to help structure the sessions and to integrate them into the semester grading process. From that beginning, tutor sessions have become an accepted course component, as evidenced by a 466% increase in tutor use over two years, to an average of almost three sessions a semester among all students of a foreign language. The work-study budget has increased in this period to $13,000 a year.
Putting tutors and students together was only a first step, however. We needed to ensure a positive outcome to their encounters. As Krashen, as well as others, has remarked, uncontrolled conversation is singularly inefficient as a language-learning experience at early levels of proficiency (63–64). Accordingly, our principal planned objective has become to furnish our students with an intensive opportunity to imitate native-speaker interaction in the target language. The following guidelines intended to encourage this type of tutor-student interaction in a relatively pressure-free environment have emerged:
Interpersonal facility, empathy, and reliability are important qualities in a potential tutor. The most important requirement, however, is not so much a personal quality as a professional sensitivity and skill, gained through experience and an understanding of the processes and problems involved in language acquisition. Though tutors should find it easy to orchestrate sessions with the detailed frameworks of questions we supply, they must still be skilled in decoding the supplied sentences for structural content, especially for time indicators (verb tenses) but also for word order, key expressions, and so on. This skill is necessary so that in the course of the conversation a tutor can exit and reenter the delineated framework without overly disorienting prepared students or putting them on the defensive. This is a fine art, clearly, and we are finding that our ideal tutors not only must be multilingual but must have the sort of interest in language acquisition that will make them receptive to training.
The tutors need to be trained in both language mechanics and interpersonal dynamics before they are able to perform in a fashion that encourages the students, satisfies the teachers, and brings enjoyment to the tutors themselves. A good tutor may, by dint of a specific consciousness of a student's ability, hold an apparently advanced conversation with that student, whereas an untrained native speaker might freeze the same student in fear through indiscriminate use of structures and vocabulary beyond the student's reach and through insensitivity to body language and other signs indicating a breakdown in communication.
We have general meetings, language-group meetings, and individual critiques throughout the semester, at which we monitor tutoring skills and discuss feedback from students and professors. We also have mock tutor sessions to dramatize procedure and communication issues. The techniques discussed in training can be put to immediate use, since the tutors may do as many as twenty sessions a week during busy periods.
The tutors are taught and reminded constantly of the acquisition sequence in the courses that concern them. This effort is important to ensure that they practice, not teach, during tutor sessions. Especially to be avoided in the course of a session is the introduction of an entirely new grammar point, which can lead to a ten-minute explanation and negate the entire purpose of the session. “Teaching” is discouraged to the point that if a student has not prepared at all and cannot respond to the practice questions that he or she was supposed to have mastered before coming, the tutor is trained to end the session immediately and ask the student to reschedule.
The tutor session that we strive for takes its shape, as mentioned above, from the oral-proficiency interview:
The tutors are taught to be aware of signs of unease in the student during steps 3 and 4 in the above sequence. The variations should be scaled in difficulty according to the student's facility and level of confidence. A confident or well-prepared student should encounter a sequence including frequent forays away from the questions list. On the other hand, if a student is increasingly unable to answer or shows signs of discomfort or irritation, the tutors are taught to return to the list of prepared questions and attempt to reestablish a smooth flow of exchanges.
We also insist on the avoidance of negative feedback (“You don't know that ?” “Come on !”); such feedback is generally counterproductive. We strive for sympathetic, low-key conversation leaders, for a “collaborative relationship” (Foss) between tutor and student rather than an antagonistic or judgmental one. As trained proficiency interviewers know, successful “conversations” require complex skills that improve with use and the interviewer's constant retraining. Since we are also subject to a natural turnover in staff through graduation, training is an ongoing necessity.
The recruiting and retention of tutors have not proved to be significant problems. The word is out on the international-student network, and prospective tutors stop in at the center all year long. A list is kept and any vacancies are quickly filled. Tutoring is a popular and interesting job: out of eight spring-semester tutors, one has graduated and seven are returning. The tutors correctly feel that working at the learning center allows them to display, and to earn appreciation for, their unique qualities as multilingual and multicultural students. This positive feedback often helps to counterbalance the problems with English and the less than seamless integration into American student culture that may cause them difficulty elsewhere. In the spring of 1989 we employed natives of Milan, Rome, Neuenkirchen, Madrid, Guayaquil, Lima, Geneva, and Tokyo. They speak from two to five languages each, and many study an additional language during their employment. All these tutors are native speakers of the languages in which they tutor, though several are able to tutor in two or more languages.
The tutors work an average of ten hours a week and are compensated out of institutional funds at an upper (“skilled”) work-study scale. Since the Immigration and Naturalization Service allows holders of foreign-student F1 visas to work on campus, such students constitute the largest portion of our hiring pool. The cost to the college is not substantially greater than that of hiring traditional lab assistants, the difference being that in peak periods we double- and triple-schedule tutors of the major languages.
The implementation of the program has not occurred without difficulty. For example, maintaining a balance between a strong esprit de corps among the tutors and their natural feelings of solidarity with the students they tutor is a significant problem. If international tutors feel their elite linguistic status too strongly, they tend to separate themselves from the client group and regard with disdain some students' often painfully gradual efforts at acquisition. If, at the other extreme, they become personally involved with the students they serve, they have a tendency to succumb to last-minute appeals for help on homework, compositions, or dialogues.
To keep inappropriate assistance to a minimum, we instruct the tutors to help with problems on completed work, if need be, but never to do translations or to help students who have made no prior effort. The tutors are given frequent reminders about the limits of their obligations and are assured that they can always hold the director responsible for their intransigence with students. To combat elitism, we continually emphasize courtesy in dealing with every student, regardless of the student's aptitude or achievement level.
A second difficulty is the generation of appropriate materials for tutor sessions and the integration of these materials into the course curriculum. Teachers of language generally concentrate their preparation efforts on in-class time. It requires a significant change in orientation for a teacher regularly to plan and produce activities for tutoring sessions outside the classroom. Finding the time is the first problem. Second, such a project falls into the category of curricular innovation, which is rarely valued in tenure consideration and is not remunerated for adjunct professors. At Bentley departmental support and recognition of the validity of tutor-based activities have been vital to progress in this area. For example, full-time tenure-track professors are now responsible for generating tutor-session materials in connection with coordinating a course.
Comparing Bentley's program with others of its kind is somewhat problematic. Much of the literature on peer tutoring concerns experiments in a secondary-level classroom environment in which more successful learners are paired with students who are struggling. This practice is suitable in the classroom but not in the language lab or as a component of an enrichment course. ESL has been another field of active enquiry in peer tutoring, especially in the use of community resources and volunteers as an adjunct to classroom work for adults. This approach, however, is feasible only where the language being taught and the native language in the surrounding region are the same. Steven Gaies offers an overview oriented principally toward the existing research in these areas, of tutoring by colearners and by native English-speaking volunteers.
The reports on existing college-level peer-tutoring programs indicate fundamental choices that diverge significantly from the directions taken at Bentley. At Hofstra University, for example, conversational tutor sessions are made available to language majors and minors for pass/fail credit, independent of other established courses (Jean 33). This approach eliminates the necessity of coordination between professor and tutor, class and tutor session, as well as avoiding the problem of weighting tutor sessions in the grading process.
St. Anselm University, in an enviable display of institutional resolve, added to its original 3-hour class schedule a full class hour in which small groups are led by native speakers (Flaherty and D'Espinosa 176). The framers of this program were insistent on native speakers (not second-generation immigrants or advanced students) to ensure cultural validity in discussions. Brown University, on the other hand, after experiments with both native and nonnative student “collaborators,” found certain arguments in favor of nonnatives, notably their greater sensitivity to learner problems (Fraser 109).
The University of Missouri, Rolla, offered academic credit to tutors leading small groups in conversation (Gaies 84). This is one possible solution in situations where funding a tutoring program is an obstacle.
These examples give an indication of the degree to which institutional and departmental circumstances may determine the response to key questions concerning the establishment of tutoring programs. Pedagogically, the pivotal question is the level of instruction targeted by the program. At an advanced level, the coordination and structuring of the content of such a program becomes much less critical. It is those who are attempting to enrich the experience of students in the first two years of college study who will find the Bentley approach most helpful.
Though the effect of peer tutoring on language acquisition has not been measured objectively or quantitatively at Bentley, informal comments from the faculty and the students alike indicate that peer-tutor sessions are a welcome change and a cause of improved student performance on oral exams and in the classroom. Students mention the advantage of interacting with other speakers besides the teacher, cite their own increased listening and comprehension skills, and praise “helpful and encouraging” tutors. A student who met weekly with tutors had this to say: “I was always glad and anticipative when entering the lab, appreciative of the fact that the school let me have time there, and especially [of] the commitment to learning that everyone shares there.”
Tutor-student interaction represents, in the most concrete and immediate fashion, what language teachers hope to foster: meaningful communication between human beings of differing languages and cultures. Tutors differ crucially from an interactive computer program in that they participate in the difficult process of foreign language acquisition with sympathy, warmth, and enthusiasm.
Tutors are certainly not a panacea. For major universities, the logistics of administrating thousands of tutor-student meetings are a substantial hurdle, even if a group format is adopted. For small and mid-sized institutions, however, tutors would seem to be a valid and accessible alternative, equally helping faculty members and students to overcome the constraints of limited time and large class size that have become part of the accepted difficulties in foreign language courses at many institutions of higher learning.
The author is Director of the Modern Language Learning Center at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he also teaches Spanish, French, and Portuguese.
The question sheet below was used during the spring of 1988 with a second-semester Spanish course. We had just completed lesson 13 in Contigo: Essentials of Spanish (Ozete and Guillén). Family and social life had been studied and discussed in class. The preterite-imperfect-present perfect distinction was the principal grammatical focus of the semester.
[Instructions to the student:] This sheet contains questions to guide the tutor during the session. You should make an appointment, then hand him/her this sheet. Do not keep notes or reading matter in front of you during the session. Relax and converse, asking the tutor questions as well, if they occur to you. You should plan on 20 minutes.
La vida de familia
¿De dónde eres?
¿Te gusta la ciudad? ¿Por qué?
¿Tu familia vive allí todavía?
¿Cuántos son en tu familia?
¿Cómo se llama tu hermano(a)? Descríbamelo(a).
¿De joven, pasabas más tiempo con tu familia o con tus amigos? ¿Por qué?
¿Qué hacían juntos? ¿Qué hacen ahora?
¿Comían juntos/salían al restaurante? ¿Qué tipo de restaurante les gustaba más?
¿Era importante la religión/la iglesia durante tu niñez? ¿Has cambiado de ideas desde entonces?
¿Había una diferencia entre los papeles de hombres y mujeres en tu familia? (¿Quién trabajaba/cocinaba/limpiaba/cortaba la hierba/cuidaba de los niños?) ¿Piensas que tu familia futura será igual?
¿Hacías trabajo de casa?
¿Había algún día de la semana especial? ¿Y hoy día?
¿Daban muchos paseos juntos?
¿Adónde solían ir de vacaciones?
¿Adónde te gustaría ir ahora? ¿Adónde irás tú con tu familia?
¿Te parece que la vida de familia está cambiando en los Estados Unidos?
¿Qué sabes de la vida de familia en países hispanos?
¿Cómo se celebra la Navidad en México?
¿Cuál es el cumpleañios más importante para una muchacha mejicana?
Al tutor: No debe limitarse a las preguntas arriba mencionadas, sino inspirarse de ellas. Al fin de la entrevista, puede trabajar los verbos soler y gustar/parecer si lo necesita el estudiante.
[Translation (not included on handout): “ To the tutor: You shouldn't limit yourself to the questions above, but rather use them as a starting point. At the end of the interview, you can work on the verbs soler and gustar/parecer if the student needs it.”]
Flaherty, Sister Etienne, and John D'Espinosa. “A New Language Program: Using Native Speakers.” Improving College and University Teaching 30.4 (1982): 175–78.
Foss, Jean M. “The Tutor-Student Instructional Interaction.” Annals of Dyslexia 30 (1986): 15–26.
Fraser, Catherine C. “Teaching Language and Culture with a Student Collaborator.” Die Unterrichtspraxis 21.1 (1988): 109–12.
Gaies, Steven J. Peer Involvement in Language Learning. Orlando: Harcourt, 1985.
Horwitz, Elaine K. “Some Language Acquisition Principles and Their Implications for Second Language Teaching.” Hispania 69 (1986): 684–89.
Jean, Denis-J. “The Development of an Individualized Conversation Program Using Native-Level Speakers.” ADFL Bulletin 12.4 (1981): 33–35. [Show Article]
Krashen, Stephen D. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon, 1982.
Omaggio, Alice C. Teaching Language in Context. Boston: Heinle, 1986.
Ozete, Oscar, and Sergio D. Guillén. Contigo: Essentials of Spanish. New York: Holt, 1987.
Rivers, W. M., ed. Interactive Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
© 1990 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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