The Impact of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development Through Scaffolding and Iranian EFL Learners’ Gender on their Speaking Task

This study investigated the impact of scaffolding and learners? gender on their speaking tasks at the Sobhan Language Institute in Shiraz, Iran. Towards this aim, the Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), and the Mean Length of Sentence (MLS) produced by the participants were measured. In this way, the researchers tried to determine if there would be any speech development using scaffolding within the ZPD. The SPSS 24 (statistical package for the social sciences) was run to analyze the collected data. A Paired-samples t-test and an independent samples t-test were used to calculate and to investigate the impact of scaffolding on the participants' speaking development. The independent samples t-test was utilized to calculate the difference between the participants' speaking tasks and gender. The findings indicated that scaffolding affected their speaking tasks development. By getting cooperation from the instructor or other students, the students could produce more sentences by providing words needed to describe the pictures. However, the results indicated that there was no significant difference between males and females in terms of the development of their speaking tasks. Implications of the results are elaborated as well.