Implementing a Student Peer-Mentoring Programme for Self-Access Language Learning

While language advising is nowadays considered an essential element in ensuring the effective use of self-access facilities, not all institutions have a budget which can support such a service. Student peer-mentoring partnerships can provide an alternative, with benefits to be derived by mentors, mentees, teachers and institutions alike. What will be described is an attempt to draw on the power of peer dynamics in a self-access context, out of the classroom, over a three-year period. The participating mentees were drawn from the author's first year, second semester undergraduate Language Mastery II (LM II) course, who were teamed up with mentors from the third or fourth year, second semester, specialist undergraduate applied linguistics course on Self-Access and Foreign Language Learning. Bringing together students from the two courses provided younger and less academically literate learners with more personalised care and attention than the teacher/author of both courses could provide in the time available, and was conducive to sharing responsibility for learning, encouraging social autonomy (Benson & Cooker, 2013; Murray, 2014). The sense of cooperation, trust and confidentiality made both sides identify more strongly with the learning community to which they belonged. Learners were encouraged to think 'out of the box' in terms of self-access and could flit between the limited resources provided in the 'walled garden' of the compact departmental resource centre and the 'public park', with the mix of resources and technologies they used in their everyday lives (Reinders, 2012). What was of particular interest was how learners overcame the obstacles and barriers of space, time and even geographical location and created their own unique tailor-made self-access environments and learning pathways.