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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 A profile of the study
The current study is enlightened by sociocultural theory which suggests that the worldis a discursive construction and language is at the heart of cognitive activity; mind isembedded in contexts and learning is a social process. According to the work of Vygotsky,a Russian psychologist, human beings construct their understanding and knowledge indialogic ways with others. What people leam from their "inter-mental" experience(communication between minds through social interaction) shapes their "intra-mental"activity (the way they think as individuals). The insights lead the author to look closely andspecifically at second language classrooms, believing that the development of a secondlanguage resides in the active dialogic co-construction of that language between teachersand learners or learners and learners. As the value of peer-peer interaction has beenincreasingly acknowledged in its effectiveness of promoting the emergence of higher levelsyntactic forms (Adams, 2004)，developing discourse competence (Tsui, 2001)，and greateropportunities for substantive conversation for sense making (Mercer, 1996; Gillies, 2006)，the landscape of language classroom has changed from predominantly teacher-frontedinstruction to pair or group work (Mori, 2004a). Therefore, the author is convinced that L2classroom researchers, especially those in China, need to further investigate into peer-peertalk in interaction to provide more implications for both L2 teachers and learners. Thepresent research，then，was aimed to explore the ways students use talk to jointly makemeaning in second language classroom and how this co-construction process results incognitive change among and within individuals.
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1.2 Significance of the study
The present study is going to investigate into the process of co-construction amongpeers in English as a second language (English L2) classroom, which can make acontribution to the study of L2 peer-peer interaction and then to SLA study in general fromthree aspects: theoretical perspective，research methodology and classroom practicalimplication.Firstly, concerning the theoretical perspective, this research is backed by socioculturaltheory, which emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between social context and languagedevelopment. As Firth &Wagner (1997) claimed, the field of SLA research reflects animbalance between cognitive/ mentalistic orientations and social/ contextual orientations tolanguage, with the former orientation being unquestionably in the ascendancy，whichhighlights the need for a significantly enhanced awareness of the contextual andinteractional dimensions of language to broaden the traditional SLA data base. Thefindings of the present study will provide additional evidence for the languagedevelopment in social plane. So the efforts made in the study can be hopefully viewed toadd some wei to the social end of this skewed scale.Secondly, regarding research methodology, the present study adopts conversationanalysis as a methodological tool to approach the data in interaction, which enables theauthor and readers to understand the process of peer-peer interaction and trace themicrogenetic evolution of the interlocutors' cognition development from an emicperspective.
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