Learning While Teaching

Abstract

Focussing on a project carried out within the scope of an English Applied to Tourism course, this chapter describes a teaching and learning strategy, putting forward the underlying rationale and outlining its design, implementation, and assessment phases. The project, whose aims included fostering students' language and critical thinking skills, challenged Hotel Management students to collaborate to produce online training modules for their peers. Relying on the use of digital technologies, most particularly LMS, and cloud-based student engagement and graphic design tools (including Nearpod and Canva), these modules were peer-reviewed and implemented, with students acting as both facilitators and reviewers. Building on existing research on the affordances of peer learning within the scope of foreign language teaching, the author frames the different activities, reflecting on how peer learning strategies can enhance students' engagement and agency, offering insights that can support English for Specific Purposes (ESP) teachers, as well as other practitioners.