The Effect Of Tasks On Collaborative Dialogue

The present study aims at investigating the effect of task type on face-to-face(F2F)collaborative dialogue in the Chinese EFL context.The focus is on how task type affects the amount and the nature of collaborative dialogue.Motivated by Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory,the study compares the effects of meaning-focused jigsaw tasks and form-focused dictogloss tasks on peer-peer collaborative dialogue.Thirty two English major freshmen from two classes participated in the study and they were assigned randomly into eight pairs in each class.Two jigsaw tasks and two dictogloss tasks were used in this study.The tasks were controlled for the content and the presentation of tasks was counterbalanced.The data was the transcripts of the recordings of peer-peer interactions,which were operationalized through language-related episodes(LREs).Then all the LREs were identified and analyzed for their frequency and nature.The nature of LREs was analyzed at the level of focus,outcome and type.Results revealed that the dictogloss task tended to trigger significantly more LREs than the jigsaw task.In addition,tasks were different with respect to the nature of LREs.With respect to the focus of LREs,the dictogloss elicited a significantly higher number of lexical LREs and grammatical LREs than the jigsaw.Regarding the outcome of LREs,correctly solved LREs and incorrectly solved LREs were significantly frequent in the dictogloss than in the jigsaw.Concerning the type of LREs,the dictogloss elicited a significantly higher number of request for assistance LREs,metatalk LREs and negative feedback LREs than the jigsaw.The thesis also discussed the pedagogical implications and provided suggestions for the future research.