داوود مشهدی حیدر

The present study was an attempt to investigate the effect of IT system-based instruction vs. traditional instruction of teaching English on Iranian low-intermediate EFL learners’ reading comprehension ability in a smart school in Tonekabon, Mazandaran, Iran. To collect the data, 60 low-intermediate high school learners took part in the study. As to the homogeneity of the participants, they took Solution Placement Test (SPT). The participants were divided into one experimental group (i.e. receiving the treatment in terms of using smart tools) and one control group (i.e. receiving no treatment and being traditionally taught through white board). A reading comprehension test (pre-test) was given to examine the participants’ initial knowledge of reading comprehension. Similar to the pre-test, a reading comprehension test (post-test) was utilized to check the participants’ performance of reading comprehension and look into their probable progress as a result of receiving the treatment. Findings revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group after the treatment highlighting the success of instruction in enhancing the students’ reading comprehension ability. The results suggest the application of smart tools to promote interaction among the learners and assist them to freely express their thoughts in the e-learning environment.

In regard to recent revolution in the education domain, English Language Teaching (ELT) assigns a sociopolitical dimension to itself in the light of Critical Pedagogy. The present study, in line with the recent educational revolution, aimed to investigate the effectiveness of critical thinking on improving EFL learners’ productive skills. The statistical population consisted of 164 pre-intermediate attendees of EFL in an English Language Institute in the city of Babol selected for taking an Oxford Placement Test (OPT). The participants were 80 Iranian pre-intermediate EFL students within 10-20-year range, enrolled in Shokouh English language institute in Babol, who were randomly divided into two experimental and two control groups of (N=20) for each group during summer 2018 through the non-probability sampling design. Then, IELTS pre-intermediate speaking and writing tests were taken as the pre-test to make sure that they have failed to have a previous knowledge of objective structures. Unlike the control group, the participants in the experimental group were told to apply critical thinking instructions in learning speaking and writing skills. After intervention, the same pretest was taken to the participants in both groups as the posttest to determine the result of gaining the medical aid. Independent and paired sample t-tests were run to answer the research questions. The results indicated that critical thinking is highly contributive in learning productive skills. The findings of this study can be applied in methodological issues.

This study sought to promote EFL learners' speaking ability drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic discourse pattern (DDP) and to explore their perceptions towards implementing dialogic teaching (DT) in a speaking classroom. To this end, from the population of students in different language institutes, 47 students were selected based on a purposive sampling method. The data were collected at two step-wise processes adopting a mixed-method approach. First, the researcher directed two EFL teachers to apply the DDP principles in a dialogic (DG) and non-dialogic group (NDG). The intervention lasted for 12 weeks. Then, a posttest of speaking was conducted to track the possible improvement. The findings attested that the dialogic talk could promote EFL learners’ speaking ability. Next, DG group was required to complete a written discourse completion task to determine the extent to which incorporating DT could promote learners’ speaking ability. To analyze the data, Thomas's (2006) inductive approach was adopted comprising the dominant themes. The results revealed different themes and sub-themes such as developing self-directed learning skills, disseminating critical literacy practice, fostering language learning, promoting motivation and affective factors, to name but a few. The findings propose some implications for classroom management, materials preparation, and language policy program.

The main role and responsibility of second language writing teachers is to help learners to write with minimal errors. To do so, teachers need to provide students with appropriate types of feedback. In this research, the researchers examined the effect of post-text written corrective feedback on written grammatical accuracy of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. In the first phase, Nelson Proficiency Test was administered to 45 intermediate students studying in two different classes at Cambridge Language Institute in Sari. 35 students were selected. Then, they were randomly assigned to experimental and another groups. The research was carried out in 12 sessions. The experimental group received post-text feedback on their writing tasks while the control group received the conventional type. After collecting data, the researchers used paired and independent sample t-tests to analyze the data. The results indicated that those students who received post-text feedback outperformed the ones in the control group. It means that indirect corrective feedback is more beneficial to students than the direct one. Therefore, post-text feedback can be adopted by EFL instructors to promote students’ written grammatical ability.

Due to the scarcity of quantitative studies as to the impact of portfolio assessment on EFL students’ writing ability and the significant impact of the interaction between portfolio assessment and self-regulation strategy, the present study aimed to explore whether portfolio assessment has any significant effect on improving Bachelor of Arts (BA) English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ paragraph writing ability, and whether this effect differs within high/low self-regulated learners or not. To do so, 60 intermediate female students were chosen out of 145 learners through the administration of a standard version of Oxford Placement Test (OPT). The participants were randomly assigned into one control (30 participants) and one experimental group (30 participants). The experimental group was assigned into two groups of high and low self-regulated learners, (15 participants for each group), based on Magno’s (2009) Academic Self-regulated Learning Scale (A-SRL-S) questionnaire. Participants of the control group were taught and assessed based on traditional teaching and assessment, whereas those in the experimental group were taught and assessed via portfolio-based instruction and assessment techniques. The analysis of the results of the study revealed that portfolio assessment has a significant effect on improving writing ability (p=0.001). The results also showed that high self-regulated learners have taken more advantage of portfolio assessment than the low self-regulated ones (p = 0.000). The results obtained from the present study can have beneficial contributions to teaching, curriculum development, and testing.

The present study aimed to explore the impact of teaching critical thinking skills through applying debate on the use of communicative strategies. At first 60 intermediate students were selected and placed in two homogenous groups of control and experimental through passing Nelson test. Then, a critical thinking appraisal was run to the two groups both before and after the treatment. The treatment that experimental group received during the term was 10 sessions of debate as a classroom activity. The analysis of the collected data exhibited significant difference between the two groups concerning critical thinking skill. The results showed that the subjects in experimental group were oriented toward critical thinking. In a subsequent stage, the subjects were asked to write a story in English based on a series of related pictures. Then, the number of communicative strategies including achievement and reduction ones were counted carefully. A t-test was run to find whether the differences between the two groups regarding the use of such strategies were significant or not. The results revealed that the subjects in experimental group used more achievement strategies. Concerning the use of reduction strategies by the two groups no significant difference was found.

The present study explores the impact of corpus-based collocation instruction on intermediate Iranian EFL learners' writing ability. For this study, 84 Iranian learners, studying English as a foreign language in Bayan Institute, Iran, were selected and were randomly divided into two groups, experimental and control. Conventional methods of writing instruction were taught to the control group while the experimental group received corpus-based collocation instruction in writing essays for 15 sessions. The design of the research was based on pre- and posttest method. The tests were employed to measure the writing fluency of the two groups. Test results were scrutinized to answer a major question for correlation between the participants’ variety of corpus-based collocations and their writing. The results illustrated that there was a significant difference between the mean scores of control and experimental groups in writing elements (p<0.05). Actually, lexical collocation instruction expanded the writing elements of vocabulary and mechanics rather than grammar and fluency in writing essays. The study findings indicated that there is a significantly positive correlation between the participants’ use of various lexical collocations and their writing proficiency.

The present research was conducted to compare the efficiency of 3 groups of ESP instructors: content teachers, language teachers, and professional ESP teachers. The main question was aimed to investigate whether there was a significant difference between the 3 mentioned groups of ESP teachers and if there was, who was more qualified to teach ESP. To find the answer, a questionnaire was developed by the researchers, with an acceptable reliability and validity. The questionnaire was distributed to 135 students in several universities. The obtained results revealed that there was a significant difference between the 3 groups of teachers. Content teachers gained the least score, while language teachers and professional ESP teachers were located in the same subset and gained the highest score. It was concluded that language instructors and professional ESP teachers were more qualified to teach ESP.

The present study investigated the impact of bilingual education on language achievement of Iranian Pre-intermediate EFL learners. It actually used bilingual education through content- based methodology or subject matter such as math, science and reading. To this purpose, the researchers used 40 Pre-intermediate EFL participants who were studying English conversation at a private language institute in Sari. These learners were chosen and divided randomly into control and experimental groups. Both groups took the same test as a pretest. The experimental group had access to bilingual education methodology through math, science and reading, while in the control group, participants had no special treatment. They had just access to the conversation by the use of conversation methodology which was assigned by the institute curriculum. After nineteen sessions, the posttest was administrated to both control and experimental groups. Based on the obtained results, a significant difference was observed between the mean scores of the two groups on the posttest. In fact, the null-hypothesis was rejected as the experimental group performed significantly better on the posttest.

The present study aimed at investigating the effect of peer and teacher scaffolding through a process approach in a technology-enhanced environment on vocabulary learning among high and low self-regulated learners. Participants of the study were 120 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners who were selected based on their scores on a sample copy of the Oxford Placement Test (OPT). The participants were divided into three groups each consisting of 40 learners. One group of the participants received peer scaffolding; the second group was exposed to teacher scaffolding via the Telegram app based on process approach principles, while the third group served as the control group. The control group received conventional vocabulary teaching in such a way that the Telegram app was not employed. The learners in the control group were also provided with vocabulary exercises in the vocabulary book (English Vocabulary in Use). Data were collected through a sample copy of OPT, a vocabulary test, and a self-regulation questionnaire. The results of a one-way ANOVA revealed that both peer and teacher scaffolding significantly affected vocabulary learning. However, there was no significant difference between peer and teacher scaffolding in terms of their effects on vocabulary learning. The results of a two-way ANOVA indicated that the main effect of treatment on vocabulary learning was significant; however, there was no statistically significant difference between the effects of the two treatment modalities on students’ vocabulary learning.

Given the significance and problematic nature of speaking in EFL instruction as well as lack of orthodoxy of views on acceptance or rejection of language learning transferability, this study proposed an inventive model to teaching thinking via questioning as a way to trigger speaking. It compromises six components, and organizes a rich interactive teaching/learning environment to gauge its usefulness in the development of EFL learners' oral skill as well as its inter-domain transferability effects. To this end, we compared the performance of 60 participants on pre-post-treatment oral narrative tasks over thirteen treatment sessions with a time allocation of 45 minutes for each session: One group with isolated questioning instruction and the other with integrated one. The results of independent samples t-test indicated that instructional treatment assisted the experimental group participants to outperform the control group learners solely in terms of measures of lexical and grammatical complexity. It is also suggested that the merits of questioning intervention transfer to learners' performance on a delayed task in a new social domain. As proposed, implementing the integrated approach of HOQs assisted EFL learners to successfully accomplish demanding oral tasks initially in academic setting and in later delayed novel transcontextual settings.

The present study was conducted to investigate the impact of collaborative output tasks on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ knowledge of active/passive voice. The main question this study tried to investigate was whether there would be any significant difference between the means of the two participant groups in a grammar posttest if the groups were taught with two different teaching methods. The participants of the study comprised 40 EFL learners. They were divided into two experimental and control groups. Each group consists of 20 participants. The control group received the traditional treatment while the experimental group was taught active/passive voice through collaborative output tasks. Two similar tests were prepared as the pretest and posttest to measure the students’ active/passive voice knowledge at the beginning and end of the study. To analyze the data, a series of paired sample t-tests and independent sample t-tests were run. The results showed that participants in the experimental group had a better performance than the control group. Consequently, it was concluded that the utilization of collaborative output tasks in teaching active/passive voice led to a higher level of knowledge improvement.