عباس بیات

Iran’s educational system has undergone new reforms during the last decades. To investigate the effectiveness of the new reform in English as the lingua franca of the world, the current study emphasizes the reading comprehension abilities of grade twelve Iranian female students in English as a foreign language. To this end, 167 students' responses per item of three tests of English reading comprehension were gathered from four different high schools of Malayer. Students' responses in three different item types (three literal, three reorganization, and three inferential comprehension items) from three different reading texts were analyzed altogether. A quantitative design was employed to descriptively analyze the students' responses. The results of the analysis revealed that grade 12 students in Malayer are stronger in literal comprehension compared to the other two comprehension levels: reorganizational and inferential items. This indicated the students' lack of skill in reading between the lines as well as the inability to synthesize and analyze different implicit information in the text that leads them to make meaning. The results can be beneficial for language institutes, English Teachers, and practitioners. Keywords: Inferential Comprehension, International Reading Comprehension Assessment,  Reorganizational Comprehension

Over the years, much research has been done on the role of tasks in L2 learning, but little is known about how sequencing tasks affects listening comprehension. Thus, the present study evaluated the effect of sequencing repeated familiar tasks (SRFT) along three dimensions of complexity i.e. +/- visual support, +/- few elements, and +/- planning time. Sixty upper-intermediate EFL learners were randomly selected as experimental group (n=30) and control group (n=30) in this experimental research. To control the homogeneity of the participants and their topic familiarity, the Success Placement Test designed by Fricker (2007) and the listening comprehension test (developed by Richards, 2005) were administered respectively. Then the posttest of listening for IELTS which included 3 levels of task complexity was employed to analyze the results of SRFT. The participants in the experimental group were required to listen to keeping fit tasks ordered from simple to complex tasks during 10 sessions. The participants in the control group performed disordered tasks. T-test and SPSS version 20 were utilized to analyze the tests. Before employing treatment, the placement test addressed that both of the groups obtained no marked difference level of English language knowledge. They also displayed the same topic familiarity of listening comprehension on the pretest. In the end, the t-test indicates a positive influence of SRFT for the experimental group in the posttest. The findings of this study recommend sequencing tasks in English classes as a basic tool to improve the listening performance of learners.

This study aimed to investigate the effect of task-based language teaching on news-story writing in Iranian EFL context. To this end, a quasi-experimental, pre- and post-evaluation research design was employed. First, 78 Iranian BA sophomores majoring in translation at Islamic Azad University, Hamedan Branch, were selected through convenient sampling as the participants of the study. They were then randomly divided into two treatment and control groups--task-based group (TB) and conventional teaching group (TC) respectively. Both groups were initially given a test on news story writing to measure their writing ability at the pre-treatment stage. Then, the control group was taught through explanations abstracted from some deductive plans and reading-oriented method of teaching news story structure. The other group was exposed to a six-weak TB treatment based on Willis’ TBL framework. The post-treatment researcher-made test was then administered to compare the participants’ writing progress. The obtained statistical results showed that the employment of the task-based language learning scenario does not lead to an overall significant improvement of Iranian EFL learners’ performance in news-story writing as compared with the conventional teaching of the same skill. This is perhaps due to learners’ negative attitude towards TBLT, which originates from the inconsistency of TBLT with the educational philosophy in Iran. Therefore, TBLT programs may need to be modified on the basis of the local and traditional specifications of the education in the target community to be able to develop the learners’ news-story writing skill.