Investigations into EFL Students’ Pragmatic and Grammatical Awareness through Peer Collaboration

Ethan Fu-Yen Chiu, Yuan-shan Chen () and Hsuan-Yu Tai
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Ethan Fu-Yen Chiu: Department of Applied English, National Chin-Yi University of Technology, Taichung 411030, Taiwan
Yuan-shan Chen: Department of Applied English, National Chin-Yi University of Technology, Taichung 411030, Taiwan
Hsuan-Yu Tai: Department of English, National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology, Kaohsiung 824, Taiwan

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 17, 1-18

Abstract: Grounded in sociocultural theory, collaboration has been recognized as a useful teaching method. In English teaching, while a number of studies have examined the effectiveness of collaboration on grammar, research on pragmatic awareness is scarce. As such, this study explored how collaboration influenced, firstly, grammatical and pragmatic awareness and, secondly, error correction: the two major components in language competence. In this study, 32 Taiwanese English major juniors and seniors with CEFR B2 were recruited. These participants were required to work individually and collaboratively to identify pragmatic/grammatical errors, to rate the severity of the errors, and to correct these errors in a discourse completion task (DCT). The results revealed that peer collaboration achieved higher scores on error identification, severity ratings, and error correction than did individual work. The facilitative effects of collaboration may have been attributable to collaborative and expert–novice interaction patterns that showed a high degree of mutuality and equality during discussions. In conclusion, the findings showed that collaboration echoed the spirit of sociocultural theory, and could serve as a useful approach in English instruction, to create a sustainable learning environment in an EFL context such as Taiwan, where the national bilingual 2030 policy has been launched to require learners to develop life-long learning of English.

Keywords: collaboration; pragmatic and grammatical awareness; error identification; error correction; EFL (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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