Learning Through Teaching: Impact on Knowledge Retrieval Immediately After Student-Teaching in an EFL Setting

Learning through teaching is often described as an enriching experience that reflects a deeper understanding of one's area of learning focus. To understand this potentially rewarding experience, this research, as the focal point, intends to identify any significance regarding knowledge retention between students who were tested on a certain subject matter immediately after they had taught it to several classmates, and those who were tested several weeks after teaching. On a secondary note, the test scores of the student-taught material themselves help to show how well the students learned from teaching in general. The study consists of two groups, each of which was composed of 24 Ecuadorian EFL college students who taught on a basic grammar point to several other peers in their class. The retrieval of the knowledge that the subject group had taught was examined a few minutes after their teaching. The control group's knowledge was examined several weeks (at least one month) after their time in front of the classroom. The results are surprisingly insignificant. Additionally, the average test grades scored by the participants which reflect the grammar points taught were rather low. The question, thus, remains on whether or not certain factors played a role that may have influenced the results. Therefore, further research on this topic is recommended, perhaps with some variations which could favor more the notion of learning by means of teaching. Keywords: EFL, English, grammar, interteaching, learning, teaching