ON THE EFFECT OF TEACHER SCAFFOLDING ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF EFL LEARNERS’ LISTENING COMPREHENSION ABILITY

The sociocultural theory (SCT) has been widely investigated in the field of second/foreign language acquisition. One of the constructs of SCT which is termed scaffolding has been worked on in various studies. The present study aims to investigate the effectiveness of the implementation of teacher scaffolding on the development of EFL learners’ listening comprehension ability through listening comprehension tasks. 64 Intermediate EFL learners were firstly homogenized by the TOEFL test and then randomly assigned to the control and experimental groups. Learners in both groups participated in a listening comprehension test which acted as the pretest of the study. A set of eight listening tasks were chosen to be taught in both groups during the eight sessions of the treatment. The experimental group did the tasks with the teacher trying to scaffold them at each stage of the task. Learners in the control group worked individually with little social interaction. After the treatment, learners participated in the post-test. A set of independent sample t-tests was run to compare the performances of both groups. The results revealed that learners in the scaffolding group outperformed those in the non-scaffolding group. It was hence, concluded that teacher scaffolding had a significant effect on the development of EFL learners’ listening comprehension. Possible reasons, supporting factors and implications of the study are discussed in more details.