The Effects of a Mentoring Program in Connection with College English Reading and Writing Classes in a Non-Face-to-Face Situation

Abstract

The non-face-to-face curriculum, which began with the COVID-19, has revealed some unexpected problems, including a lack of communication between instructors and learners and poor academic performance. To solve these problems, we studied the effects of the extracurricular course by linking the non-curricular course with the regular subject, English Reading and Writing under non-face-to-face situations. We used a mentoring program as a non-curricular course and gave learners who were learning in a situation separated from the instructors the opportunity to communicate with them. The survey and interviews were used focused on the learners’ satisfaction with a mentoring program, learning outcomes, and the program improvement suggestions. And we found that mentoring enabled one-on-one communication between learners and their instructor. And also mentoring played a positive role in strengthening learners' English reading ability as the participants' scores in English reading improved significantly after mentoring. Mentoring could be a way to solve the problem of academic decline caused by non-face-to-face classes. The pedagogical implications are suggested in terms of the effective mentoring program.