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This study aimed to investigate if dual version reading comprehension had a positive effect on Intermediate EFL students' general vocabulary acquisition, receptive and productive knowledge of vocabulary and students' synonymous power of words. Two groups were selected-the experimental group and the control group. The study included: (1) four pretests (2) the dual version reading comprehension, and (3) four posttests. It was found that there was no significant difference between the two groups of students on the pretests. However there was a significant difference between the two groups of the students on the posttests. Overall, the dual version reading comprehension vocabulary-learning made the experimental group learners outperformed the control groups in terms of their performance on four types of vocabulary tests. This indicates that students following dual version reading comprehension were more successful in vocabulary acquisition, and developing their receptive knowledge of vocabulary, transferring their receptive knowledge in to the productive knowledge and enhancing the memorization of the synonymous words.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of gender in Iranian EFL learners’ output complexity and scaffolding mechanism as they were performing the tasks. The participants were 18 intermediate learners from both genders who were selected based on a proficiency test and an interview. They were placed into three groups based on their gender. They were also assigned into nine different collaborative pairs and were required to perform four tasks while being tape-recorded for 36 sessions. The audio-recorded dialogues were then transcribed and divided into AS-units. Ohta’s (2001) seven types of scaffolding methods were used as a framework to analyze the data. The findings indicated that the interlocutors in female-female pairs scaffolded their struggling partners more than the other pairs and produced a more complex output; however, the interlocutors in male-male pairs underperformed the other groups. It can be concluded that gender plays an important role in EFL learners’ output complexity and scaffolding mechanisms they employ. Keywords: AS-units, gender, scaffolding mechanism, sociocultural approach, task-based language learning