Summer
Peer-to-Peer English Tutoring
Program 2005
Saturday,
September 24, 2005
Peer
tutors find that help cuts both
ways
PERRY
YU
An English
tutoring programme held over the
summer showed how much teenagers
can learn from and help each
other.
Twelve
student tutors from international
schools in Hong Kong and British
secondary schools participated in
the Chinglin Tutoring Programme.
They helped 25 students from Hon
Wah Middle School, a
Chinese-medium secondary school
in Kennedy Town, to brush up
their English and prepare for
their HKCEE English exams. The
volunteer student tutors came
from the German Swiss
International School, West Island
School, and Diocesan Girls'
School, as well as from
Cheltenham Ladies' College and
Queenswood School in Britain.
Three times a week, student
tutors led three hours of
conversational English and
reading/writing workshops.
In
a peer tutoring programme, an
organised learning process is
designed to allow a student
volunteer, with minimal training
and with a teacher or an adult's
guidance, to serve as the tutor
and help students at the same
grade level. The goal is
primarily academic. In Chinglin,
student volunteers are encouraged
to do more - recruit fellow
tutors from their schools, plan
and organise the teaching and
learning activities, and solve
problems by themselves.
Not
surprisingly, with no guidance
other than a stack of HKCEE
English syllabus textbooks,
student tutors found the design
of the coursework difficult. They
also faced the problems of
absenteeism, inattention in
class, and their own scheduling
conflicts. They learned how
difficult it is to teach and
motivate, and hence how to be
better students by paying more
respect to their own teachers.
Such
challenges forced the tutors to
be innovative. Over the weeks,
tutors and students played word
games, staged dramas and watched
episodes of Friends,
besides going through grammar and
sentence structure drills.
Some
Hon Wah students cited
improvement in their
pronunciation or vocabulary but
more cited an increase in their
confidence to speak and ask
questions and in their interest
to use English more.
Peer
tutoring could bring about a sea
change in students' learning
attitudes - the close, friendly
interaction among peers helped to
impart to the students a
willingness to try new things and
to gain new learning experiences
that a conventional
instructor-student mode in the
classroom may not be able to
instil.
Perry
Yu is education consultant and
director of Maplewood Education
Services, Hong Kong, a college
counselling provider that
organised the Chinglin Peer
Tutoring Programme. He plans to
expand it to cover more schools
next summer. Visit www.maplewood-edu.com.
Source:
Insight & Opinion, Education
Post, South China
Morning Post, Hong Kong,
September 24, 2005, p.E4. (education.scmp.com
version - requires
registration at scmp.com.)
 Program
chronicle
Program
experience sharing
Program
photos
|
Hon
Wah Middle School on Ching
Lin Terrace, Hong Kong. The
summer tutoring program is
named Chinglin
Tutoring Program
after the terrace. Chinglin
«C½¬ means
the Green Lotus, and
sounds the same as Youth
«C¦~ in
Cantonese.
Peer
Support
- SCMP
Young Post cover
story August 29, 2005
|
