Indonesian EFL Students’ Verbal Episodes in Proficiency Pairings

Abstract

One of the ways to improve EFL students’ ability in writing is assigning the students to work collaboratively in the form of pairings based on their proficiency in the process of writing. While research has revealed that proficiency pairings affect students’ writing achievement, little is known about the types of EFL students’ verbal episodes in proficiency pairings. This study aims to describe EFL students’ verbal episodes in proficiency pairings. A case study design was used in this study. It involved 40 EFL students of the English department in an Indonesian university who were divided into two groups based on the types of proficiency pairings: heterogeneous (20 students) and homogenous (20 students). Therefore, this study also intends to identify which of the two types of proficiency pairings produces more verbal episodes than the other. The results of the study show that Indonesian EFL students used three major types of verbal episodes: language-related episodes (LREs), text-related episodes (TREs), and scaffolding episodes (SEs). The study also revealed that proficiency levels determined the categories of LREs and SEs most frequently produced by heterogeneous and homogeneous pairs, while both heterogeneous and homogeneous pairs were likely to produce almost the same frequencies of categories of TREs more particularly in terms of organization and content.