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Socioculturally oriented developmental Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP) studies have just recently drawn the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers' attention, and the role of concepts like peer scaffolding, and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) in ILP development are among rich areas in need of attention. The present study investigates the significance of the effect of expert peers' ZPD-wise, co-equal peers' ZPD-insensitive and teacher fronted ZPD-insensitive scaffolding on EFL learners' pragmatic development. The number of students who participated in this study was 85 of which 27 were male and the rest were female. They were organized into three experimental and one control groups. The subjects in the experimental groups were given either explicit ZPD-wise or implicit ZPD-
wise scaffolding by the expert peers, or ZPD-insensitive scaffolding by their co-equals, while the subjects of the control group received ZPD-insensitive teacher scaffolding. The study reveals that the expert peers' ZPD-wise explicit and implicit scaffolding are more effective than the other two intervention types for the ILP development, however, the co-equals' scaffolding proved to be the third effective procedure for the subjects' co-construction of ZPD and ILP development. An implication of the study is that different forms of peer scaffolding are relatively effective for the EFL learners' ILP development.
 

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The present study examines the impact of focused tasks on the development of Iranian EFL learners’ pragmatic competence. To this end, we compared the effectiveness of the dictogloss (DIG) as an output-based task and the consciousness raising (CR) as an input-based task in teaching English requestive downgraders. Prior to the experiment, 147 Iranian EFL learners participated in the study to develop the instruments. Also, 43 American native English speakers provided the baseline data for the construction of the recognition test and the instructional treatment.  We matched 60 Iranian EFL learners in two groups based on their scores on the Oxford Placement Test (2004). The groups were then randomly assigned to instructional conditions namely, the DIG and CR tasks. The instructional treatment continued for 8 sessions. The results revealed that neither the effects of instructional treatment nor the effects of time were significant between the groups on pragmatic measures. The findings also demonstrated that participants in both tasks preformed significantly better in the immediate and delayed posttests than in the pretest. Similarly, participants in both groups maintained the positive effects of the treatment in the delayed posttest on the production and perception measures. For the recognition measure, however, the participants in the DIG condition significantly fell to a lower level in the delayed posttest.