Motivating Twenty-First-Century Learners: The Impact of an Online Reciprocal Peer-Tutoring Initiative for Foreign Language Learning

This chapter presents key findings from a 4-year research engagement with a school in New Zealand that has embraced the opportunity to teach the Net Generation. We have followed the school’s implementation of the foreign languages (FL) curriculum for its Year 7 and 8 students (age 11+ to 12+) through a combination of forward-thinking leadership and technologically rich programme design incorporating a blended model. Following a quasi-experimental pretest/posttest approach, we collected data to measure the effects on students’ FL proficiency and motivation as a result of a dedicated online writing peer-tutoring initiative. Our study enabled us to consider the interplay between motivating the learner, educational leadership and curriculum design, and our data provided evidence of students’ engagement in meaningful and authentic written interactions. Pre- and post-intervention questionnaires and summative interviews with students indicated benefits in terms of motivation towards language learning, and engagement with peers as tutors and tutees. Our findings demonstrate that, although not without its limitations, when it comes to motivating netizens to learn an FL, there is considerable potential in technology-mediated peer tutoring. For several learners, learning a language online optimised conditions for authentic interaction and genuine collaboration with others while learners co-constructed new knowledge. Although working under the guidance of their teachers, students exercised agency in the nature and form of the interactions, becoming the drivers of their own learning as true members of the Net Generation.

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