Abstract:
Peer assessment has gained growing popularity in education and teaching. Being a learning tool, evaluating their peers can equip learners with skills to develop judgments about what forms high-quality work. There have been however research gaps in the literature showing a lack of adequate work on the investigation of peer assessment in a group-oriented classroom context. The present study intended to compare the effectiveness of group work with peer assessment and scaffolding with lack of it on learners’ oral accuracy. For this purpose, the regular past tense –ed grammatical target structure as a challenging feature was selected. A total of 34 low-intermediate Iranian EFL learners in two intact classes took part in the study. Although one class was exposed to group work enhanced by peer assessment and scaffolding, the control class did not receive any such instruction. Participants provided answers to pre- and post- grammar tests and their performance was subjected to statistical data analysis by means of ANCOVA. The results indicated the superiority of the experimental group in comparison to the control group. The findings were therefore in line with the cognitive elaboration hypothesis and the sociocultural theory. The findings were discussed with relation to implications for language teachers.
Machine summary:
The present study intended to compare the effectiveness of group work with peer assessment and scaffolding with lack of it on learners’ oral accuracy.
The present study was an attempt to investigate the role of peer assessment and group work within the learners’ ZPD in their oral language performance.
Van den Berg, Admiraal, and Pilot (2006) noted that sufficient timing and small group work were effective for learning from revisions according to the received peer feedback.
The present study was, as a result, an attempt to examine the use of peer assessment in group work strengthened by scaffolding on Iranian EFL learners’ regular past -ed structure use in oral language production.
Is there a significant difference between peer assessment (coupled with scaffolding and group work) and lack of it in EFL learners’ oral language accuracy?
Results A one-way ANCOVA was run to provide an answer to the research question of the study concerned with the role of peer assessment embedded in group work and scaffolding on learners’ oral accuracy.
The findings of this study supported the effective nature of peer assessment and group work in facilitating learners’ acquisition of regular past tense –ed as a challenging structure for Iranian EFL learners.
The effectiveness of the instructional intervention in the present study implies that learners were more active and participated in oral language production more, which indicate that grammar learning could be fostered (Kern, 1995; Egbert, 2001; Bax, 2003; Fiori, 2005; Van Deusen-Scholl, Frei, & Dixon, 2005; Fitze, 2006).