Extract

The following sections are devoted to the portrayal of the stimulus material developed for the treatment and the control group of the main study. As for the control group, this stimulus material owes to the PPP approach to teaching and learning EFL, whereas socio-cultural learning tasks (SCLTs) function as stimulus material for the treatment group. SCLTs have been developed for both constructs to be measured before and after training, namely Reported Speech and Past Tenses. The development of the SCLTs presented here was based on insights obtained from an extensive pilot study in the course of which various elements from TBLT/L, TSLT/L and socio-cultural theory were tested in authentic classroom situations.65 Some major insights derived from the pilot study are outlined in section 4.1.

Further, the researcher’s task definition elaborated throughout the previous chapter served as a blueprint for the construction of Reported Speech and Past Tenses SCLTs and is therefore reproduced here (as it is the final version of the researcher’s task definitions as portrayed in sections 3.2.2, 3.2.6, 3.3.4 and 3.6.3, any emphases are omitted):

“A socio-cultural foreign language learning task is a teacher-designed classroom activity, the performance of which can be predicted to a considerable extent and which invites learners to use the target language in receptive and productive ways. The design of socio-cultural learning tasks owes to fundamental principles of socio-cultural learning theory: Their ultimate goal is the gradual formation of grammatical concepts on each individual student’s mental level via...