Scaffolding strategies boost EFL students’ grasp of abstract linguistic concepts

Students learning English as a foreign language often sail through concrete vocabulary but stall when a text asks them to reason about concepts they cannot see, touch, or picture. Terms such as deep structure, deixis, presupposition, and competence have no physical referent, so learners cannot anchor them to sensory experience the way they can with words like table or book. A new quasi-experimental study from the University of Anbar in Iraq reports that a structured package of four scaffolding strategies was associated with measurable, statistically significant gains in exactly this kind of abstract conceptual understanding among undergraduate English learners.

The study, published in the Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education, enrolled 45 third-stage undergraduate students, 25 women and 20 men, most of them aged 21 to 23, who were taking a linguistics course in the English Department of the College of Arts during the 2024–2025 academic year. Because the institutional structure made it impossible to assign students to separate treatment and control groups, the researchers used an intact-group, single-class design with a pre-test, mid-test, and post-test administered over a 14-week semester. The tests were each one hour long and combined multiple-choice and matching items with short-answer and analytical questions, with scoring aligned to Bloom’s Taxonomy from basic recognition to deeper conceptual application.

The intervention centered on four strategies drawn from sociocultural theory and the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development: labelling, repetition, code-switching, and prompting and questioning. Labelling gave learners clear verbal identifiers for abstract concepts, which prior psycholinguistic work suggests helps category formation and retrieval. Repetition involved planned re-exposure to content through restating and paraphrasing, consolidating terms into memory. Code-switching meant deliberately shifting into the students’ native language, Arabic, to bridge unfamiliar English concepts to familiar equivalents. Prompting and questioning supplied guided cognitive support, pushing students to infer, compare, and explain rather than simply recall. Instruction followed a gradual release of responsibility: support was intensive and teacher-directed in the first phase, weeks 2 through 7, which emphasized labelling and repetition, and then progressively reduced in the second phase, weeks 9 through 13, when all four strategies were deployed with heavier use of code-switching and questioning.

The statistical results traced a steady climb across the three testing phases. A one-way repeated measures ANOVA found that the differences among the three phases were statistically significant, F(2, 88) = 10.00, p < 0.001, with an eta-squared effect size of 0.185, which the authors characterize as a medium-to-large effect. Paired-sample t-tests showed significant improvement between every pair of phases: t = −2.30, p = 0.026 from pre-test to mid-test; t = −8.78, p < 0.0031 from mid-test to post-test; and t = −8.62, p < 0.0052 from pre-test to post-test. The largest gain appeared between the mid-test and post-test, suggesting that students responded most strongly once all four strategies were in combined use. Mean scores rose by roughly 3.96 points from pre-test to post-test.

Effect-size analysis reinforced the pattern. Using Cohen’s benchmarks, the effect grew progressively from d = 0.27 at the pre-test phase to d = 0.98 at the post-test phase, the latter approaching the threshold for a substantial difference. The improvement was not universal, however. While most students progressed, a few recorded low gains and two students showed no improvement at all. The authors attribute this variation to factors documented in earlier research, including individual learning differences, motivation, engagement, and test anxiety, and note that students may struggle when tasks fall outside their Zone of Proximal Development, either far beyond their independent level or too close to it.

Beyond the test scores, the researchers probed how students experienced the strategies through a questionnaire containing demographic items, 16 Likert-scale statements, four for each strategy, and six open-ended questions. The questionnaire’s reliability was high, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.81. Descriptive analysis revealed uniformly positive perceptions, with mean ratings ranging from 3.88 to 4.06 on the scale. Repetition received the highest rating, at a mean of 4.06 with a standard deviation of 0.39, followed by code-switching at 3.95, labelling at 3.92, and prompting and questioning at 3.88.

The qualitative responses, analyzed thematically, converged on three themes: positivity and learning satisfaction, usefulness, and challenges. Students repeatedly described the strategies as helpful for understanding and remembering abstract material. One participant noted that hearing a concept repeated with different examples made difficult ideas clearer weeks later, while others credited labelling with clarifying new terms through simple definitions and examples, and code-switching with helping them map meanings between English and Arabic and recall them faster during tests. Prompting and questioning, students reported, pushed them to think more deeply and participate more in class discussions, and to read more attentively because they anticipated being asked questions.

The challenges, though reported by only 7 of the 45 participants, were instructive. Some students found excessive repetition made lessons feel slow or boring, and others said code-switching encouraged over-reliance on Arabic at the expense of practicing English. Two students flagged the one-hour lecture limit as a constraint, arguing that the strategies require processing time and multiple attempts that the schedule did not always allow. The authors observe an interesting tension here: the strategies rated highest quantitatively were the same ones that drew the most complaints qualitatively, a divergence they interpret as the difference between cognitive utility and affective response, and they recommend varying repetition formats and using code-switching in a planned, purposeful way to keep engagement high.

The study’s authors are careful to frame the findings within their design’s limits. With no control group, improvements cannot be attributed to the scaffolding strategies exclusively, and the single-class sample of 45 students at one university limits generalizability to other disciplines, educational levels, and EFL settings. Validation steps were nonetheless extensive: three experts reviewed the instruments, a pilot study was run with 15 non-participant students, two external raters scored a random 25 percent of test sheets with good consistency, Pearson correlations among the three tests supported construct validity, and external auditors and triangulation strengthened the qualitative findings. The authors call for future work with control-group designs, longer follow-up periods, classroom observations, and interviews to deepen the evidence base.

For practitioners, the study offers a sequenced playbook rather than a one-size-fits-all prescription. The authors suggest beginning with labelling and repetition when abstract concepts are first introduced, deploying code-switching selectively and returning to English once partial understanding emerges, and introducing prompting and questioning as learners show signs of being able to recognize but not yet explain or apply concepts. Support, they argue, should be continuously calibrated to learners’ performance, in line with the principle of contingent scaffolding. Within the boundaries of a single-group quasi-experimental design, the results suggest that when abstract linguistic concepts are taught through layered, gradually withdrawn support, EFL learners can move from surface-level recognition toward the deeper conceptual reasoning that such material demands.

Subject of Research: The effect of scaffolding strategies on EFL students' comprehension and retention of abstract linguistic concepts

Article Title: Exploring the impact of using scaffolding strategies on EFL students’ comprehension and interpretation of abstract concepts: a quasi-experimental design

Article References: Rajab, H. A. H., Abdullah, M. Y., & Ali, A. H. (2026). Exploring the impact of using scaffolding strategies on EFL students’ comprehension and interpretation of abstract concepts: a quasi-experimental design. Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education, 11(1), Article 84. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40862-026-00461-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40862-026-00461-1

Keywords: scaffolding strategies, EFL learners, reading comprehension, abstract concepts, quasi-experimental design, Zone of Proximal Development, code-switching, repetition, labelling, prompting and questioning, University of Anbar, linguistics education