The Impact of Teacher-Student Discussion on the Complexity of Iranian Learners’ Oral Discourse

This study attempted to investigate the impact of teacher-student discussion during the narrative task performance on the complexity of task-based oral discourse among eighty Iranian intermediate level students at Jahad-e-Daneshghahi institute,Tabriz Branch. The assumption is that learners have available limited attentional capacities that the different components of language production and comprehension compete for such limited capacities. A number of proposals have been made as to how some attention may be focused on form. It was hypothesized that providing an opportunity to have discussion between teacher and students about the narrative task would lead to more complex performance. To test the research hypothesis, a quasi experimental design was used. The participants in this study were eighty intermediate level English learners who were selected out of a population of 200 students on the basis of their scores on a proficiency test. The independent samples t-test results and the analysis of variance indicated that teacher-student discussion while performing oral narrative task resulted in significant differences in participants’ oral discourse in terms of complexity. However, there was no significant effect on complexity in control group which was not provided with an opportunity to have ‘teacher-student’ discussion while performing narrative task