Collective Scaffolding, Intensive Mentoring, L1-mediation and EFL Learners’ Paragraph Development: A Sociocultural Perspective

Many studies, today, support the position of Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory (SCT) and its promising contributions to the field of second language learning and teaching. Parallel to this line of inquiry, drawing upon three techniques grounded in the SCT, the present study investigated the relative effectiveness of collective scaffolding, intensive mentoring, and L1-mediation on EFL learners’ paragraph development. To this end, 64 Iranian EFL learners in three experimental groups and one control group agreed to participate in an eight-week research study. The data obtained from the pretest and posttest were analyzed through ANCOVA, indicating that the learners in the experimental groups significantly outperformed their counterparts in the control group in terms of paragraph writing. Pair-wise comparisons also showed that the learners who received collective scaffolding had more improvement in their writing, followed by L1-mediation and intensive mentoring. The results, thus, highlight the essential role of social interaction, scaffolding, mediation, and collaboration in language learning and teaching and suggest that taking advantage of SCT and its promising contributions such as collective scaffolding, intensive mentoring, and L1-mediation can improve the status quo and add more dimensions to the existing literature on language learning and teaching.