The Effect of Peer Scaffolding on Developing L2 Pragmatic Knowledge: A Sociocultural Perspective

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.