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Individual versus pair work on L2 speech acts: production and cognitive processes

  • Ming-Fang Lin , Yuan-shan Chen EMAIL logo and Hui-Ju Wu
Published/Copyright: January 11, 2022
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Abstract

This study aims to examine the extent to which peer collaboration affects EFL learners’ speech act production and cognitive processes. Eleven EFL students in the individual group and 22 students (11 pairs) in the collaborative groups were asked to report their cognitive processes when working on a written discourse completion task (WDCT). The WDCT performances were rated on a five-point Likert-type scale, and the verbalizations were analyzed in terms of pragmatic-related episodes (PREs). Results showed that the individual group scored higher on content, whereas the collaborative group outperformed their counterparts on forms. Regarding the cognitive processes, the individual group tended to plan the general direction of their writing before writing the WDCT and paid more attention to sociopragmatic content while writing. In contrast, the collaborative group planned specific details before the task and attended to pragmalinguistic forms more often while writing.


Corresponding author: Yuan-shan Chen, Department of Applied English, National Chin-Yi University of Technology, No. 57, Sec. 2, Zhongshan Rd., Taiping Dist., Taichung 411030, Taiwan, ROC, E-mail:

Award Identifier / Grant number: MOST 107-2410-H-167-003

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Dylan Lin, Angel Chen, Rosia Li, Sandy Hsu, and Iris Lee for their kind assistance in this study. We are also grateful for the anonymous reviewers’ comments on the earlier drafts of this paper.

  1. Data availability statement: Due to the nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data is not available.

  2. Research funding: This study was funded by the second/corresponding author’s research grants awarded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C. (MOST 107-2410-H-167-003).

  3. Conflict of interest statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Received: 2021-05-29
Accepted: 2021-11-29
Published Online: 2022-01-11
Published in Print: 2024-01-29

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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