The Effect of Teacher’s Scaffolding and Peers’ Collaborative Dialogue on the Acquisition of English Tenses in the Zone of Proximal Development: A Sociocultural Perspective

Abstract

This study investigated the extent to which teacher’s scaffolding and peers’ collaborative dialogue could contribute to the acquisition of English tenses in Iranian EFL learners with different levels of grammatical knowledge. To fulfill this objective, 142 college students were selected through convenience sampling to constitute the scaffolding and collaborative groups. After the participants’ initial level of grammatical knowledge was measured by a pre-test, they received their respective treatment and their achievement was measured by a series of immediate post-tests and a final post-test. The results indicated no significant difference between the performances of the two experimental groups. When the collected data were analyzed for high achiever and low achiever subgroups formed based on their interlocutors, no significant differences were observed between high achiever subgroups. But it was found that those low achievers who received assistance from the teacher and those who collaborated with high achievers had significantly better performances than those low achievers who collaborated with low achievers. Therefore, it can be concluded that the knowledge and expertise needed for helping the learners move ahead in their ZPD can be provided in those dyadic configurations in which at least one of the interlocutors exceeds a threshold level of knowledge.