The Effectiveness of the Discussion Leader Intervention in Peer Instruction

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The study’s goal is to determine how well a discussion leader intervention in peer instruction (PI) affects the production of discussion reports following group conversations. PI encourages student engagement in talks and offers them numerous opportunities to speak. However, some students continue to avoid participation in class debates or are too nervous to speak in front of others. This study suggests that the discussion leader intervention in PI would help students engage in discussion more actively and with responsibility and end up with rich discussion to be revealed in a discussion journal. Two groups were divided with one intervened by a leader and a teacher and the other by a teacher only as the conventional PI does.
The ESL Composition Profile (Jacobs et al., 1981) was administered to students (N-39) enrolled on English reading course. The ESL Composition Profile, which includes the sub-components of content, organization, vocabulary, language, and mechanics, was designed to assess content validity. Students were asked to write a discussion journal after reading an English novel and having PI discussion with questions issued by a teacher. The results of the T-test analysis demonstrated a significant difference in journal writing productivity between the group that had a leader intervene and the group that had not. However, this paper didn’t investigate why PI affects rich production in writing a journal. Its follow-up research should be conducted in terms of ‘why’ issues that could be related to students’ better understanding, self-confidence, and communication skills.