The Role of Peer Support in ESL Students' Accomplishment of Oral Academic Tasks

How do L2 students work together to accomplish their public, in-class tasks? From a sociocultural perspective (e.g., Duff, 1995; Lantolf, 2000), the present study takes a behind-the-scenes look at peer collaboration in which a group of three Japanese undergraduate students engaged to accomplish an academic presentation task during their year-long studies in a content-based ESL program at a Canadian university. Methods for data collection reflected a qualitative case study approach and included audio-recorded observations of project work, in-depth interviews, and students' journals and papers. Data showed that students' preparatory activities outside the classroom included negotiating task definition and teacher expectations, sharing experiences, collaborative dialogue (Swain, 2000) in preparing presentation materials, and rehearsing and peer-coaching. Analysis shed useful light on students' contextualization of and orientation to the task, the interdependence of spoken and written language in task preparation, and the role of the L1 as a scaffold for L2 task accomplishment.