Socio-academic listening in Systematised Reciprocal Peer Tutoring (SYKL) in Danish L1

1. Research topic/aim
Conversation dominates teaching, yet orality – including listening comprehension – remains underexplored (Holmberg et al., 2019). Its didactics are often unsystematic (Adelmann, 2012; Høegh, 2018; Otnes, 1997), especially when students work independently in pairs or groups. Systematised Reciprocal Peer Tutoring (Danish abbreviation: SYKL) offers potential for enhancing listening comprehension in schools. In SYKL, students work in pairs on academic tasks, alternating roles between tutor and tutee, with pairings based on social as well as academic criteria to foster socio-academic participation (Schmidt & Thygesen, 2024). This presentation explores the implementation of SYKL in Danish L1 for grade 4 students (ages 10-11), examining their listening skills and strategies (Adelmann, 2012; Høegh, 2018) during SYKL sessions and how listening comprehension (Adelmann, 2012) can be scaffolded.

2. Theoretical framework
Design and analysis are primarily informed by research on peer tutoring (Schmidt & Thygesen, 2024), scaffolding (Sutherland, 2015), and listening as an interactional (Adelmann, 2012) and interpersonal (Otnes, 1997) activity, including non-verbal features like body language, gazes, and gestures (Høegh, 2018).

3. Methodology/research design
The study employs a qualitative research design to analyse video-recorded SYKL sessions in four grade 4 classes, encompassing 12 Danish-L1 lessons. Selected dialogues are examined through embodied interaction analysis (Streeck et al., 2011), focusing on students’ socio-academic listening skills and strategies. Additionally, focus group interviews with students, teachers, and advisors provide deeper insights.

4. Expected results/findings
Preliminary findings indicate that students’ socio-academic listening strategies and comprehension can be enhanced within the SYKL framework, especially when dialogues are scaffolded through careful pairing, task design (Author, 2024), and systematic use of metacommunication and conversational ground-rules (cf. Sutherland, 2015). Furthermore, engaging in SYKL dialogues allows students to express and share their curiosity, frustrations, and potential solutions in pairs, which over time can improve their oral participation in class discussions.

5. Relevance to Nordic educational research
By focusing on listening strategies in SYKL, the presentation contributes to research on orality and peer tutoring, enhancing the quality of pair work in schools. The study offers insights into how more students can actively participate in Nordic classrooms, where collaboration and dialogue are fundamental.

References
Adelmann, K. (2012). The art of listening in an educational perspective: Listening reception in the mother tongue. Education Inquiry, 3(4), 513-534.
Author. (2024).
Holmberg, P. et al. (2019). On the emergence of the L1 research field. A comparative study of PhD abstracts in the Nordic countries 2000-2017. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 19(1), 1-27.
Høegh, T. (2018). Mundtlighed og fagdidaktik. Akademisk Forlag.
Otnes, H. (1997). Lytting som norskfaglig disiplin: Noen forskningsmetodiske og didaktiske refleksjoner. Forskningsdagene ’97 ved Høgskolen i Vestfold. https://www-bib.hive.no/tekster/hveskrift/notat/1997-3/a11.html
Schmidt, M. C., & Thygesen, S. (2024). Think Carefully, Let’s Bond, and Other Tutoring Strategies: Socio-academic Participation Patterns in Peer Tutoring. European Journal of Inclusive Education, 3(1), 25-42.
Streeck, J. et al. (Eds.) (2011). Embodied interaction: Language and body in the material world. Cambridge University Press.
Sutherland, J. (2015). Going ‘meta’: using a metadiscoursal approach to develop secondary students’ dialogic talk in small groups. Research Papers in Education, 30(1), 44-69.