This study investigated the extent to which the replacement of teacher’s scaffolding with peers’ collaborative dialogue in line with implementing an innovation in the realm of interaction patterns was perceptually welcomed by English language learners in the sociocultural context of an Iranian university. To fulfill this objective, 142 college students were selected as the convenience sample of the study and constituted the scaffolding group (n = 74) and collaborative group (n = 68). After the participants’ initial level of grammatical knowledge was measured by a pre-test, they received their respective treatment and their achievement was measured by a post-test. The results of an independent samples t-test indicated no significant difference between the performances of the two groups. Then the participants’ attitudes toward the possible interaction types and interlocutors were evaluated by a questionnaire. The results indicated that the participants’ attitude toward peers' collaborative dialogue was not positive enough to facilitate the implementation of an innovation of this type in the sociocultural context of the study. Based on the results, it can be concluded that there is a perceptual gap between what the learners perceive as fruitful dyadic configurations and the efficiency of these interaction configurations.
