Comparing the Effects of Collaborative and Individual Output Tasks on the Acquisition of English Articles

The use of pair and small group work has been supported within the interactionist and sociocultural theories of learning. It is assumed that collaboration would lead to second language acquisition. Inspired by these theoretical claims, the present study investigates the effects of two output tasks on the acquisition of English articles. Thirty-one EFL learners, divided into two groups of pairs and individuals, participated in this study. All participants were administered a pretest and a post-test and completed two output tasks (cloze and text-editing) during four sessions. The results were indicative of no significant difference in the acquisition of English articles between the two groups of the study. However, a significant difference was found for the effect of task types.