The Effect of Peer Scaffolding on Developing L2 Pragmatic Knowledge: A Sociocultural Perspectiv
Building upon the sociocultural theory of Vygotsky, the aim of this study was to explore the immediate and delayed effects of peer scaffolding on EFL learners' comprehension and production of requests and apologies. The participants were 86 Iranian EFL learners who, drawing on their scores i...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Lasting Impressions Press
2017-12-01
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| Series: | International Journal of English Language and Translation Studies |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www.eltsjournal.org/archive/value5%20issue4/5-5-4-17.pdf |
| Summary: | Building upon the sociocultural theory of Vygotsky, the aim of this study was to explore the
immediate and delayed effects of peer scaffolding on EFL learners' comprehension and production of
requests and apologies. The participants were 86 Iranian EFL learners who, drawing on their scores
in the Pragmatic Listening Test (PLT) and Oral Discourse Completion Test (ODCT), were
homogenized in terms of their L2 pragmatic proficiency. Subsequently, they were randomly assigned
to the control and scaffolding groups. Both groups received metapragmatic instruction on requests and
apologies; however, the scaffolding group engaged in collaborative problem-solving tasks during
which they needed to read the situations with pragmatically problematic items and jointly work out
their appropriate alternatives to them. The results of pretest-posttest-delayed posttest comparison
revealed the outperformance of the scaffolding group compared with the control group in both
measures of comprehension and production of requests and apologies. The pragmatic gains were also
found to be maintained over a period of a month. The findings have implications in language teaching
and pedagogy and suggest that pragmatic knowledge is likely to emerge from assisted performance. |
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| ISSN: | 2308-5460 2308-5460 |