فرید قائمی

To effectively and reflectively impart knowledge to their students, Iranian EFL teachers should cultivate their critical thinking dispositions (CTDs). Therefore, the aim of this mixed-methods study is twofold: Firstly, to explore how CTDs and their role in reflective teaching (RT) are addressed and perceived among EFL teachers, and secondly, to explore the interplay between EFL teachers’ CTDs and RT. To do so, 303 Iranian EFL teachers participated in this study. The data collection instruments were two questionnaires, namely CT dispositions and RT questionnaires, and a semi-structured interview. Upon collecting the data, Pearson correlations and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) using AMOS 20 were used to analyze the quantitative data. Moreover, the descriptive qualitative content analysis technique was used to analyze the qualitative data. The quantitative findings indicated that the largest statistically significant value, which identified the strength of the relationships between CTDs and RT, was attributed to integrity. This value showed that the integrity explains 13 percent of the variance in RT scores based on Regression Weights for RT and CTDs. The second significant variable was perseverance, which explained six percent of the variance in RT scores. Courage and humility variables also explain one percent of the variance in RT scores. Moreover, the qualitative results indicated that CTDs played a significant role in Iranian EFL teachers’ RT practices. The findings may have implications for the Iranian EFL stakeholders, EFL teachers, and EFL teacher training programs.

Language proficiency seems not to be realized without language learner’s engagement in terms of behavioral, emotional, cognitive, and metacognitive dimensions in the learning process. A mixed method was employed in this quasi-experimental study to examine the effectiveness of self-regulated learning (cyclical with and without emotion regulation) in improving EFL learners’ accurate use of grammatical structures and to compare it with the form-focused (non-SRL) control group. One hundred twenty-two homogenized lower intermediate EFL College students were randomly distributed to the two experimental groups and the control group. Two writing tests were used as the pre-test and post-test. The data analysis of the ANCOVA showed that self-regulated learning (cyclical and ER) had a significant effect on the students' grammatical accuracy in writing, which was followed by the SRL (cyclical) group. The focus on the form group showed the lowest performance. The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire was administered to students in the pretest and posttest phases. The result of the paired sample t-test on emotion regulation represented a large effect size. The content analysis indicated that most students significantly held positive perceptions of the SRL strategies taught. Thus, the findings of this study have pedagogical implications for F/S teachers, students, and material developers who can design SRL tasks in which language skills are met.

The present study was conducted to investigate the comparative impacts of three types of EFL teachers' mindsets on EFL learners' mindsets. The participants of the study were English Translation undergraduate students (both female and male with the age ranging of 18-35) who were selected according to convenience non-random sampling from three classes of English Grammar 1 at both Islamic Azad Universities of Karaj and Shahriyar. The total number of students in each class was 30. The course lasted 16 successive sessions. Participants were assigned into three experimental groups. At the outset, a Mindset Assessment Profile (MAP) adopted from Mindset works, INC (2002-2012) on a scale of disagree a lot to agree a lot was administered among participants in all three experimental groups. The researchers provided interventions in terms of fixed, growth, and mixed mindsets to teach English grammar. At the end of the course, the same Mindset Assessment Profile (MAP) as the one administered in the pretest phase was administered among participants in all three groups and it was demonstrated that the EFL teacher’s type of mindset can significantly influence EFL learners’ mindsets. Consequently, it was determined that helping students adopt growth mindset hinges on raising teachers’ awareness about the importance of their own mindsets as well as helping them to grow their mindsets. This study includes a variety of instructional implications for both EFL teachers and EFL learners.

Despite the determining role of culture-bound materials in the enhancement of EFL learners’ productive skills, a scarcity of investigation on the influence of culture-oriented content on their productive skills is staunchly perceived. This gap can be partly filled by implementing Content Based Language Teaching (CBLT) program which contrives the EFL content especially in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classrooms. In this respect, a culture-oriented EAP course book was designed based on Tomlinson’s (2001) materials development framework. A total of 100 participants were recruited according to their language proficiency results, and were fractionated into two productive EAP task groups embracing Oral Presentation and Systematic Writing as the two befitting techniques to strengthen productive skills. After practicing and teaching the developed course book in each class in twenty treatment sessions, the participants were given a posttest. Correspondingly, a paired samples t-test indicated that culture-oriented content affected the EFL students’ speaking and writing skills separately. Similarly, an independent samples t-test revealed the influence of culture-oriented content on their speaking skill than the writing skill. The findings suggest the significance of the first culture as the benchmark for incorporating second culture contents in EFL teaching arenas.

This study explored how much of the time Iranian EFL teachers partake in constant expert turn of events (CPD) activities and how powerful these activities were in improving their instructing techniques. The current review is meant to investigate the view of Iranian EFL instructors about CPD, additionally, various kinds of CPD activities for example CELTA/DELTA courses that they liked, and explored how frequently Iranian EFL educators partake in the accompanying CPD activities. The members were 55 EFL instructors educating at various language establishments in Tehran and Karaj city. The information was gathered utilizing a three-segment online overview. The survey had been arranged in light of a 5 point-Likert scale and had shipped off members by email. To address the review's exploration questions, enlightening and inferential insights were used. For quantitative investigation, the information was at first placed into the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). Then, at that point, utilizing enlightening measurable methodologies, different insights for the information were registered and summed up. The discoveries of this quantitative review uncovered that English educators take part in an assortment of CPD activities. The discoveries of the review have suggestions for explicit activities that might be impetuses in building uplifting perspectives towards other CPD activities for EFL educators.

Using chunks is said to bring about fluency into speech as they save speakers from constructing their speech upon a word-by-word basis. Particle phrases (A term coined in this study to refer to phrasal verbs and their derived and deviated nouns and adjectives) are also among those chunks. This study seeks to see whether memorizing them will affect EFL learners' spoken fluency. To this end, 51 Persian speaking participants (37 females, 14 males) who were selected from 3 intact classes based on their performance in narrative video-based retelling constituted the sample of the study. The study was a quasi-experimental one in design because of the non-random assignment of the participants into either of the experimental and control groups. They were assigned to three groups: two experimental and one control. Both experimental groups received the same instructions on metaphorical concepts of particles (out, off, etc.) in the 150 phrasal verbs available in Garnier and Schmitt’s (2015) frequency list. They both engaged in self-generated contexts except that those in the first came up with hands-on task of drawing sketches, too. The control group, however, received none of the above treatments. The results of a one-way ANOVA procedure in the immediate post-test indicated that the participants in the first experimental group significantly outperformed not only the control group, but also the second experimental group that made more relative gains than their counterparts in the control group. The outperformance of the first experimental group was also found in the delayed post-test, which represented the long-term effects of the methods. The findings suggest several implications for this vital but surprisingly neglected issue of engaging students with self-generated sketches.

Plagiarism is considered as a serious problem in academia around the world. The issue of plagiarism has recently received global inquiry in different fields of science, especially in foreign language (L2) academic writing. To meticulously assess the Iranian academics for plagiarism at both theory and practice grounds, developing an accountable instrument seemed to be inevitable. To bridge the gap, in phase 1 of the study, a conceptual framework for Iranian academics’ grasp of plagiarism and its components was designed after a thorough review of literature. In phase 2, a number of M.A. graduates and graduate students (n = 224) in six State and Islamic Azad universities in Iran were recruited to partake in piloting the newly-designed plagiarism questionnaire. After a two-step revising the inefficient items (n = 11), the final draft of the developed questionnaire with 36 items was administered with the main sample of participants (n = 288). An Exploratory Factor Analysis was performed to identify the components of the instrument, followed by Confirmatory Factor Analysis to measure its construct validity. As a result, the final draft of the Sociocultural Plagiarism Questionnaire contained 31 Likert-point and 5 multiple choice items in four components of awareness (10 items), attitude (8 items), sociocultural beliefs (8 items), and perception (5 Likert-point and 5 multiple choice items), which were suggested as having fundamental contributions to the Iranian academic writers’ sensitivity to plagiarism. Findings of the study suggested that (a) the Iranian academic writers’ normative sociocultural beliefs can probably reduce their sensitivity to plagiarism, (b) while the Iranian academics might have relatively high awareness and deep perception about plagiarism, their attitude toward plagiarism seems relatively neutral or even insensitive.

Quality of Classroom Life is considered as a serious issue in academia around the world, and it has recently received global inquiry in EFL and ESL contexts. However, no questionnaire has been developed to assess the Iranian students’ and teachers’ attitudes towards the quality of life in the classroom. After developing a conceptual framework, the final draft of the developed questionnaire with 71 items was administered to the main sample of participants (n=150). An Exploratory Factor Analysis was performed to identify the components of the instrument, followed by Confirmatory Factor Analysis to measure its construct validity. As a result, the final draft of the Quality of Classroom Life Questionnaire comprised 71 Likert-point items. In phase 2, a number of EFL students and teachers (50 teachers and 322 students) participated in the study which was intended to observe the impact of Modular Instruction on the Quality of Classroom Life. Findings of the study suggested that: (a) the Iranian students and teachers had highly positive attitude towards the Quality of Classroom Life, and believed that educational view, teaching quality, classroom environment, classroom management, quality of classroom interactions and puzzle content played a crucial role in exploratory practice; and (b) the modular instruction which was the descendant of Postmethod instruction had a positive impact on the Quality of Classroom Life. The findings promise implications for teachers and teacher educators as well as the materials developers as the knowledge of classroom quality and modular instruction can enhance their understanding of the nature and conditions of learning.

Particle phrases are defined as prefabricated “chunks” stored and retrieved as a whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar. This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of teaching particle-bound phrases on spoken accuracy of Iranian EEL learners. Having been homogenized, a sample of 51 Iranian EFL learners at a university in Karaj, Iran was assigned to three groups: two experimental and one control. Before the treatment, a pre-test of video-based narrative retelling was administered. The Experimental Group 1 (EG1) was presented with the target particle phrases and came up with drawings of their concepts. In Experimental Group 2 (EG2), the same procedure happened except for the hands-on drawing task. The Control Group (CG) was presented with the same particle phrases every session along with their L1 (Farsi) meanings. The results showed that EG2 (M = 5.16) significantly outperformed CG (M = 3.81) on the immediate posttest (Mean Difference = 1.34, p = .000). It was also found that EG1 (M = 4.82) significantly outperformed CG (M = 3.81) on the immediate posttest (Mean Difference = 1.01, p = .000). Plus, there was not any significant difference between EG1 (M = 5.16) and EG2’S (M = 4.82) means on the immediate posttest (Mean Difference = .334, p = .146). Regarding delayed post-test, it was shown that there was no significant difference between EG1 and EG2 on delayed posttest, but both groups outperformed CG in that regard.

This study investigated the effects of English as foreign language (EFL) proficiency on what the authors of this study called pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic recognition of EFL learners. To elicit the data, the study used two types of pragmatic measures: a pragmalinguistic recognition (PLR) test and a sociopragmatic recognition (SPR) test. Both tests were developed by the researchers of this study based on the distinction made by Leech (1983) between pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics. Subsequent to the development of the tests, 80 Iranian EFL students were divided into two groups based on their EFL proficiency level: the low level group (n = 41) and the high level group (n = 39). Each participant group was tested on the two pragmatic measures. Pearson correlation results indicated construct differences between PLR and SPR of speech acts. Moreover, independent samples t-test results revealed that there were developmental differences in pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic recognition of speech acts by EFL learners. The findings offer insights to EFL teachers and testers regarding pragmatic instruction and assessment.