IMPACT OF FACULTY-STUDENT AND PEER INTERACTION ON THE IMPROVEMENT OF FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS’ ENGLISH-SPEAKING SKILLS

Abstract

Purpose of the study: To prove that faculty-student interaction (in the way of functional interaction and mentoring) and peer interaction (performed in the form of peer-assessment) can positively influence the results of some educational assignments during the first academic year. Methodology: A true experimental research design was used in this study. The researchers applied mixed qualitative and quantitative methods to collect and analyse data. The descriptive statistical analysis was used in SPSS Version 23 (IBM Corp., 2016) to calculate the means and standard deviations in participants’ scores. After that, the correlation analysis of the acquired results was carried out. Main Findings: The t-values proved the statistically-significant difference in the participants’ success of the performance with 272 degrees of freedom and T-test p-values with the allowable error limit of α = 0.05, which allowed to conclude that faculty-student and peer interaction has a positive impact on the improvement of the first-year students’ English-speaking skills. Applications of this study: This study can be useful in planning the curriculum for the discipline “Basic course of the foreign language” for the first-year university students (in particular, assignments with monological utterances). The results of this study should be taken into consideration while designing learning programmes during the first academic year to improve students’ academic performance. Novelty of this study: This research contributes to the solution of the improvement of the first-year students’ academic performance, considering the mechanism of formation of adaptive potential in the framework of studying the discipline Foreign language by working with monological utterances.