THE DISCOURSE OF PEER MENTORING: FROM MENTORS’ PERSPECTIVES

Tóm tắt

Peer mentoring has been used as a tool to ensure students’ success in higher
education (Husband & Jacob, 2009; Yomtov et. al., 2015). This study investigated the discourse of university-level peer mentoring from a sociolinguistic perspective. The participants were first-year Linguistics undergraduates at a university in Vietnam, who were invited to join a peer mentoring program in which four or five student-mentees work with one student-mentor to improve their English listening and speaking skills. Mentoring activities consisted of both face-to-face meeting and email correspondence and were designed with support from the course instructor. We examined the students’ peer-to-peer interactions in the mentoring activities, their in-class interactions as well as interview transcripts in order to gain insights into the mentors’ and mentee’s views of the peer-to-peer relationship vis-à-vis student-instructor relationship and how these dynamics influenced the participants’ identities and the mentees’ perceived performance. Discourse analysis and narrative analysis are employed as our frameworks because people reveal their identity in their language choice (Gee, 2011) and narrative analysis allows us to observe the identity construction and reconstruction through people’s stories (Coast, 1996; Lind, 1993). The findings reveal that mentors regarded mentees as help-receivers while mentors saw themselves as experts, authorities, leader apprentices and contrasted themselves with the mentees. They were aware of their role and power and exerted them  differently in different situations

DOI: 10.18173/2354-1075.2019-0127