The Study of Interaction Features Used by Intermediate Iranian EFL Learners in Their Lexical Language Related Episodes Ehsan Alijanian English Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Isfahan, Iran Saeed Ketabi English Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Isfahan, Iran Ahmad Moinzadeh English Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Isfahan, Iran Abstract—Negotiation of meaning refers to interactional work done by interlocutors to attain joint understanding when a communication difficulty comes about. This study uses a qualitative perspective to consider the development of participant utterances in interaction in every moment. 10 English as a foreign language learners in a language school in Iran were chosen to participate in a dictogloss activity in which they were required to describe a certain word. The interaction features in their lexical language related episodes were analyzed. The results indicate that students use a wide range of interaction features in their collaborations. These features help learners generate a scaffolding structure in the LLREs in which meaning discovering is made. The use of interactive features fostered metalinguistic awareness and encouraged learners’ self-regulation. Index Terms—interactions features, lexical language related episodes, Dictogloss, collaboration I. INTRODUCTION The investigation of language acquisition from an SCT viewpoint is founded on the work of Lev Vygotsky, who saw learning as a socially arranged and educated action. Vygotsky (1978) suggested the genetic law of social improvement to represent intellectual and etymological advancement. The genetic law of improvement stipulates that mental capacities, for example, memory and consideration are followed by an outside stage that unravels in the social domain. From this point of view, speech is characteristically joined with intuition such that higher mental capacities are mediated by social and typical devices. More recently, work on the role of interaction in SLA has shifted away from pairs of learners transacting an information gap task towards the recasting (e.g., Lyster 1998; Long et al., 1998; Braidi, 2002) and focus-on-form episodes that are available in whole class settings (e.g., Ellis et al., 2001) and are often, although not always, initiated by a native speaker or teacher who has not encountered a communication failure, impasse, or breakdown, (i.e. who has understood what the non-native speaker meant) but who has chosen where some language focus would be most useful. Such a shift moves us away from classroom group work (in which learners interact with each other) towards a situation where a more competent speaker (the teacher, or a native speaker) chooses to turn the learner’s attenti on productively from meaning and towards form (Foster&Ohta, 2005). Much valuable work has been done on the way such feedback, recasting, and other language-related-episodes (Swain, 2001) might shift a learner’s attention to language form. In this research, however, we wish to return the focus to interaction between non-native speakers working together on a classroom task because this is an extremely common and widely-promoted practice in communicative language teaching, and because the idea is still prevalent that, as SLA is facilitated through learners negotiating solutions to communication failures, such failures could be usefully engineered through classroom task design (Foster&Ohta, 2005). In this view, there is an assumption that learners are on the whole not predisposed to focus on language form, but will do so when communication failure means they have to (Foster&Ohta, 2005). The Japanese language learners in Ohta’s (2001) study provided and received assistance in a variety of ways. For example, they directly asked for, and received, assistance from each other, they continued utterances that a partner was having difficulty with, chimed in with suggestions, and offered and accepted corrections (Foster&Ohta, 2005). Assistance was also provided less explicitly, for example, when a peer waited, providing a partner time to compose an utterance. Learner assistance to one another often resulted in assisted performance (Tharp & Gallimore, 1991; Ohta, 2001); the creation of utterances that incorporated the assistance of another. Assistance given and utilized creates a ISSN 1798-4769 Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 9, No. 5, pp. 1053-1058, September 2018 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.0905.20 © 2018 ACADEMY PUBLICATION