The Effect of Teacher Scaffolding and Peer Scaffolding on Intermediate Iranian EFL Learners Listening Comprehension

One of the basic skills related to learning a foreign language is listening. Scholars have tried to find strategies and techniques to aid learners to develop their listening comprehension. One of the techniques which can help learning a foreign language, in general, and listening comprehension, in particular, is scaffolding. Scaffolding can be performed by different people, including the teacher and peers. Reviewing the literature shows that teacher scaffolding and peer scaffolding have not been addressed simultaneously in one study, and it is worth examining their comparative effect on listening comprehension in a single study. In order to do so in the present study, 60 intermediate Iranian EFL learners whose scores were one standard deviation above and below the mean in the OPT test were selected and divided into three groups, two experimental groups and a control group. Before starting the treatment, a pretest of listening was given to participants of the three groups. Then, one of the experimental groups was treated through teacher scaffolding while the other one was treated through peer scaffolding for 10 sessions. In the control group, the teacher also described the listening strategies to help the learners in their listening comprehension, but the language learners did the listening tasks and activities of their course book individually. At the end, a posttest of listening was administered to all of the participants. Comparison of the groups through independent-samples t-test and one- way ANOVA showed that both teacher scaffolding and peer scaffolding were effective in improving intermediate Iranian EFL learners listening comprehension, and the effect of teacher scaffolding was significantly more than that of peer scaffolding. Therefore, EFL teachers are recommended to use scaffolding in their listening classes

کلیدواژه ها:

teacher scaffolding ، peer scaffolding ، listening comprehension