Shabnam Mokhtarnia - Alborz University
Maedeh Parsaiyan - Alborz University

The purpose of the present study was to explore the scaffolding strategies which were employed by Iranian EFL dyads while conducting a collaborative reading comprehension task. Twenty four female pre-intermediate level EFL students were selected non-randomly and divided into three groups of expert-expert, novice-novice and expert-novice pairs based on their scores on a PET test. The scaffolding strategies which were employed by the participants during the given collaborative reading comprehension task were extracted by the researcher after analyzing the transcriptions of the dialogues, having been recorded accordingly. Overall, 23 scaffolding strategies were identified among all the three groups of the participants. In the current paper, the scaffolding strategies employed by the expert-expert dyads are presented in detail and the implications are discussed in depth

Scaffolding strategies, Collaborative reading comprehension task, expert-expert EFL dyads