Question about students teaching students in online community

[morpheem]

Dear teachers on the forum,

I wanted to bounce a question about language learning methodology off you and get your opinion on the following issue: to what extent do you think students can learn from other students at a similar level without teacher intervention?

The background is the following: I'm in the process of starting up a site for English learners (morpheem.com). Its predicated on the idea of being a community-like system, where learners try out new vocabulary by writing and can give feedback to other learners on what they wrote.

Trying to correct or express an opinion on the correctness of what others wrote should (I hope) force them to think through what the learn on the correct usage of language to the same degree as when writing themselves.

Now my question to you: do you think such a mechanism makes sense? Or will learners just get confused by other learners expressing opinions that are frequently wrong or maybe even nonsensical?

From reviewing the literature on language learning, there seems to be quite a bit of support for student to student teaching working, but that's in a classroom setting where there is always an authority available to refer to. Any opinions or experiences of similar setups?

Thanks!

/ andreas

 

[emsr2d2]

The answer to this question might well lie in the "Editing and Writing Topics" section of this forum. Usually, it's a native speaker or teacher who attempts corrections to writing on there but frequently another learner will chime in. Sometimes it's helpful, sometimes it's not.

I think my main question for your site will be - who will be moderating it? How will the original poster tell whether the corrections they are being given are correct?

 

[Esredux]

Trying to correct or express an opinion on the correctness of what others wrote should (I hope) force them to think through what the learn on the correct usage of language to the same degree as when writing themselves.

I wouldn't pin much faith on it - normally, it doesn't.

 

[morpheem]

The "writing topics" forum is a really good analogy, thanks! I've also been spending quite a bit of time looking at lang-8 which is basically the same thing, except that it's not symmetric: speakers of a language help learners of the language and get help in a different language.

My thinking is to offering professional moderators / teachers as a paid service at some later stage if the concept works out. But my hope is that if you offer students enough tools - integrated dictionaries, ways of searching for sentences out of a corpus similar to the one discussed etc - the discussion around language could be quite rewarding as they really have to engage with the language rather than just getting the answer served to them.

This is based on my own experiences learning various languages where I frequently just Google a certain phrase to check how it's used. But it would interest me if there have been any attempts of trying this out as a methodology or other language learning sites doing it. Are you aware of any?

@Esgaleth: What do you feel is the biggest problem in such a setup? That students are not motivated or the lack of a clear answer / an ultimate authority?

 

[Raymott]

Googling a phrase to see how it's used does not tell you whether it is being used correctly. Often you can get a million hits for a nonsense phrase. You'll find that "How to say X?" is used as a correct English sentence whereas, in standard English, it's not.