By Lane Riddle
Last March, the coronavirus pandemic abruptly halted the in-person tutoring services that had been available to undergraduate students at UC Santa Barbara. A graduate student coordinator along with professors in the Linguistics department then worked tirelessly over the summer to transform the Linguistics Peer Tutoring Lab into a fully virtual space.
The Linguistics Peer Tutoring Lab has many perks for graduate students and undergraduate students to make connections, gain experience, and get help from peers.
The lab is overseen by graduate student Jordan Douglas-Tavani and operated by five fully-trained undergraduate tutors. Tutoring takes place completely on Zoom where the peer tutors are divided into different “rooms” coordinated according to the courses they tutor.
As a drop-in space, the lab is a place where linguistics students can get help with concepts and procedures for their main linguistics courses. These include the lower division courses Language and Linguistics and Language and Power, as well as the upper division courses Basic Elements of Linguistic Analysis, Introduction to Phonetics, and Introduction to Phonology.
Leslie Su, a fourth-year linguistics major with an emphasis on speech and language technologies, has been volunteering for the peer tutoring lab since fall 2019. She said undergraduates can get upper-division course credit in exchange for their tutoring services and are able to establish a rapport with professors, graduate students, and other undergraduate students.
“I knew I wanted to go to graduate school for linguistics, and interacting with graduate students in the linguistics department at UCSB is a huge benefit,” Su said. “Many of them are teaching assistants and have experience teaching other people and peers about linguistics. Tutoring also gives me the chance to meet other linguistics undergrads who are also really passionate about linguistics.”
The lab’s graduate student coordinator, Jordan Douglas-Tavani, says tutors go through a thorough application and training process. “[They] had to have gotten an acceptable grade in the linguistics course they are tutoring for,” he said. “They go through training on how to help, and grad students are always there to support as well.”
Of course, training looked a bit different this year than usual, so the tutors could be taught how to properly help students on an online platform. These trainings were held in the summer of 2020 with the five tutors and Douglas-Tavani tackling how to assist students on a virtual platform.
A Zoom session of the Linguistics Peer Tutoring Lab, including four undergraduate tutors and the graduate student coordinator, Jordan Douglas-Tavani, bottom right.
Douglas-Tavani stresses that having undergraduate students running the lab tutorials is key, since it is much less intimidating for many students to work with their peers rather than with a teaching assistant who is giving them a grade.
Also, the lab has set up hours that are particularly accessible to students. Whereas a teaching assistant may hold office hours in the middle of the day, the lab is open much later in the evenings, on Mondays from 7 to 9 p.m. and on Wednesdays from 5 to 6 p.m.
Still, Su and Douglas-Tavani describe new challenges that came with running a virtual tutoring space rather than one that is in-person. “Normally I would be walking around to see if students or tutors need help or support,” Douglass-Tavani said. And because many linguistics courses at UCSB work with data sets, it can be difficult to coordinate with students when both parties cannot see all the data right in front of each of them.
The coordinator and tutors will continue to offer virtual help to undergraduate students in linguistics courses for the rest of the 2020-2021 academic year.
Lane Riddle is a third-year sociology major. She wrote this article for her Journalism for Web and Social Media course.