Peer mentoring has been used as a tool to ensure students’ success in highereducation (Husband &
Jacob, 2009
Yomtov et. al., 2015). This study investigated thediscourse of university-level peer mentoring from a sociolinguistic perspective. Theparticipants were first-year Linguistics undergraduates at a university in Vietnam, whowere invited to join a peer mentoring program in which four or five student-mentees workwith one student-mentor to improve their English listening and speaking skills. Mentoringactivities consisted of both face-to-face meeting and email correspondence and weredesigned with support from the course instructor. We examined the students’ peer-to-peerinteractions in the mentoring activities, their in-class interactions as well as interviewtranscripts in order to gain insights into the mentors’ and mentee’s views of the peer-to-peerrelationship vis-à-vis student-instructor relationship and how these dynamics influenced theparticipants’ identities and the mentees’ perceived performance. Discourse analysis andnarrative analysis are employed as our frameworks because people reveal their identity intheir language choice (Gee, 2011) and narrative analysis allows us to observe the identityconstruction and reconstruction through people’s stories (Coast, 1996
Lind, 1993). Thefindings reveal that mentors regarded mentees as help-receivers while mentors sawthemselves as experts, authorities, leader apprentices and contrasted themselves with thementees. They were aware of their role and power and exerted them differently in differentsituationsDOI 10.18173/2354-1075.2019-0127