The Effect Of Task Complexity On Peer Scaffolding In The Oral Interaction Of College EFL Learners

Peer scaffolding commonly exists in the interaction among English learners and presents different characteristics in different environments.It is worth investigating the use of peer scaffolding in the process of task completion,which is a major component in task-based teaching.As one of the characteristics of task type,task complexity is of great significance to this research field.The present study takes Sociocultural Theory(SCT)as framework to explore the characteristics and usage of peer scaffolding in the oral interaction of college EFL learners under different task complexity conditions.Three questions are addressed as follows:1)What are the functions of peer scaffolding used by Chinese EFL learners when they complete an oral task?2)What characteristics does peer scaffolding show under different task complexity conditions?3)What is the effect of peer scaffolding on learners' oral production under different task complexity conditions?An empirical study was conducted to answer the questions.Two experimental classes including 38 non-English major freshmen from a university in Liaoning Province participated in two oral tasks with different task complexity which were carried out every other week.The participants were asked to/not to look at the picture according to the task complexity condition.In each task,they were required to produce an individual description of the content of the given picture at first,which followed by a discussion of the picture in dyads.After the discussion part,all the participants were asked to describe the picture by themselves once again.The whole process was recorded and then transcribed for further study.A semi-structured interview was also conducted by the researcher after the completion of two tasks,which was used to collect some detailed information from 10 randomly selected interviewees and discover the usage of peer scaffolding and changes of learners' language performance in collaborative tasks.The research results reveal that: 1)peer scaffolding were found to have eight functions in the oral interaction of task completion,the most frequently used are providing opinions and feedback;2)although it displayed no significant difference in the frequency of peer scaffolding applied in different task complexity conditions from the quantitative data,it was discovered from the qualitative analysis that peer scaffolding under different task complexity conditions resulted in differences in the usage and characteristics on various aspects;3)learners tended to use opinions provided by peers in the complex task,contributing to rich content and clear logical relationship of their oral production;moreover,learners made improvement in the accuracy of oral production,which should owe to peer scaffolding in language error correction.Besides,peer scaffolding of providing vocabulary and expression were effectively accepted by learners in both tasks,thus promoting more fluent and coherent production.