Implementing Peer Teaching to Enhance English Students’ Language Learning: Kurdish EFL Teachers’ and Students’ Perspectives

Abstract

The present study is aimed at introducing the idea of "peer teaching", a student-centered instructional method that can engage students during class and outside the class to reveal common misunderstandings. The study also talks about the guidelines and purposes of implementing the method, and benefits and difficulties of its implementation in English language classes. Data were collected through open-ended questionnaires distributed among Kurdish students majoring English language at University of Garmian and English language teachers at both Garmian and Raparin Universities. The study findings show that the participants have positive perspectives towards implementing peer teaching in EFL classes to enhance students' learning and language abilities. The teacher participants have neutral responses on using the method in the past. They also mentioned a group of benefits of the model and a number of barriers to its implementation in college classes. Moreover, the student participants welcomed the model and considered it as important as they relied on when they couldn't understand teachers' explanation and missed a session. Likewise, they asserted its usefulness for students who teach and are taught. Finally, students have different views on whether peers' or teacher's teaching more influential is. Most of them rely on peer teaching when necessary, though they think the information students acquire the knowledge from teachers' teaching then use it in peer teaching. While, a small number prefer peer teaching to teacher's teaching.

Perceptions of peer-teaching strategy in the English major at a public university in Ecuador.

“…To collect the data, two semi-structured interview guidelines were developed following the questions from the "Teacher Questionnaire" designed by Adil and Ali (2018) as the main data collection instruments. The first semi-structured interview was conducted with the efl teacher who was in charge of monitoring the sessions where peer teaching was applied.…”

“…In addition to the benefits of this strategy for English teaching, it is considered a way of helping students of efl to learn efficiently, improve their performance in the language, achieve the level of proficiency needed by the teachers, and gain remarkable marks. That might be the reason why researchers such as Adil and Ali (2018), Grubbs (2009), Kavanoz and Yüksel (2010), Sunggingwati (2018) have carried out studies on peer teaching.…”