چکیده:
Drawing upon sociocultural theory of Vygotsky, the current study
aims to investigate the effect of dyadic interaction in mixed and
matched level proficiency pairings on comprehension and production
of request and apology speech acts. The participants were 125 EFL
learners who were randomly assigned to control and experimental
(interaction) groups. Based on their scores in the pretest including a
pragmatic listening test and an Oral Discourse Completion Test
(ODCT), those in the experimental groups were assigned to the mixed
(H-L) and matched level (H-H and L-L) dyads. Both the control and
experimental groups received metapragmatic instruction on speech
acts; however, the experimental groups were engaged in collaborative
problem-solving tasks on speech acts for nine sessions. Following the
treatment, the posttest was administered, the results of which revealed
the outperformance of the interaction groups compared with the
control group. Moreover, mixed level dyads were found to outperform
their matched level counterparts in both measures of comprehension
and production of speech acts. The findings have pedagogical
implications for L2 teachers and practitioners on how to best pair
learners in collaborative activities.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The Effect of Mixed and Matched Level Dyadic Interaction on Iranian EFL Learners’ Comprehension and Production of Requests and Apologies Zahra Fakher PhD candidate Pyame Noor university fakherzahra@yahoo.
com Drawing upon sociocultural theory of Vygotsky, the current study aims to investigate the effect of dyadic interaction in mixed and matched level proficiency pairings on comprehension and production of request and apology speech acts.
Based on their scores in the pretest including a pragmatic listening test and an Oral Discourse Completion Test (ODCT), those in the experimental groups were assigned to the mixed (H-L) and matched level (H-H and L-L) dyads.
Both the pretest and posttest included a pragmatic listening test and an ODCT, each one including 10 items with the items varying in terms of sociopragmatic elements of power, social distance and degree of imposition (Brown & Levinson, 1987).
Subsequently, four Paired samples t-tests were run to provide an account of the improvement of mixed and matched groups from pretest to posttest in measures of comprehension and production of request and apologies.
00 In addition to descriptive statistics, to answer the research questions, two paired samples t-test were run to investigate the significance of the difference between the mean scores in the comprehension and production pretest and posttest (Table 3 and 4).
By reference to the results of Table 6 and7, we can answer the second research question and conclude that mixed ability group indicated an increase from pretest to posttest scores of comprehension and production of speech acts as a result of being engaged in dyadic interaction.