Class-Wide Peer Tutoring and Students’ Reading Comprehension Achievement

The main objective of the present study was to investigate the impact of classwide peer tutoring on students’ reading comprehension achievement in English as a foreign language (EFL). In so doing, two third-grade intact classes (n=60 students), in an Iranian junior high school, were randomly assigned to control and experimental conditions. The experimental group was divided into six groups of five, a tutor was assigned to each group and students worked in their groups by following the steps involved in peer tutoring cycle, whereas the control group followed the conventional method in which students followed an individualistic instructional approach. Two different domain-referenced multiple-choice reading comprehension tests were used to assess the reading comprehension ability of the students on a pretest and posttest. The results of independent samples T-test showed a statistically significant difference at P≤0.05 that can be attributed to the effect of working in groups on the reading comprehension.