مهناز آزاد

EFL textbooks play a challenging role in underpinning or imposing certain ideological values, such as gender-related values on students. Thus, this inquiry examined Iranian high school teachers’ perceptions of the issue in mandated EFL textbooks (Vision series). This study adopted an exploratory descriptive method with a qualitative approach to collect and interpret the data. The population comprised all members of the Iranian high school EFL teachers’ channel from whom, thirty teachers were selected through a volunteer sampling method. As the study concurred with the COVID-19 pandemic, a researcher-made semi-structured interview was administered via WhatsApp and Telegram, and then, the responses were analyzed and interpreted using thematic analysis via the Nvivo 12 software. The data analysis showed that most teachers believed in the unequal representation of male and female characters in the series. Moreover, it was held that gender representation has educational effects on students' learning motivation, desire, and educational goals through the creation of gender stereotype roles. The findings revealed the permanence of male dominance in the textbooks and highlighted the must for the stakeholders to address gender inequalities as one of the most crucial sociocultural concerns of Iranian EFL educational textbooks.

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effects of immediate corrective feedback and delayed corrective feedback on EFL learners’ speaking fluency and speaking anxiety. The study adopted a quasi-experimental design with two experimental and no control groups. The participants consisted of 42 intermediate Iranian EFL learners at an English Institute in Tehran who were randomly assigned to two experimental groups. The instruments of the study included: the PET, teacher-made pre- and post-tests, and a speaking anxiety questionnaire. After the pre-test, the participants went through a ten session treatment during which the first experimental group received immediate corrective feedback while the second group received delayed corrective feedback. After the treatment process, a posttest was administered to both experimental groups to examine the effect of the treatment. Moreover, the participants in both groups filled in the speaking anxiety questionnaire to identify their anxiety level during in-class activities as well as those instructor’s behaviors and characteristics which might reduce their anxiety in class. The recorded data were transcribed and analyzed. The results indicated that delayed corrective feedback has a positive effect on EFL learners’ fluency and it also decreased their anxiety level.

Recently, numerous studies have investigated the influence of technology use within the educational settings pointing that the perception of the students as well as the instructor towards technology use is indicative of how well technology might be integrated in instruction. Therefore, this study was designed to explore university lecturers’ perceptions toward instructional technology, their actual versus perceived ICT literacy, the extent to which they integrate technology in their instruction and the challenges they face in successfully integrating instructional technology in academic context. The study adopted a mixed method design and was of exploratory nature. The population consisted of 711 male and female university students studying in different majors including Science, Engineering, Humanities, and Art. Also, 111 instructors teaching different fields took part in the data collection process. Two different questionnaires were devised for the instructors and the students. Besides, for gathering more reliable data, a semi-structured interview was conducted with 51 instructors and 135 students together with an observation to give more depth to the data. The data were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The study concluded that university lecturers had positive attitude toward ICT and were moderately proficient in the use of ICT while university students had different levels of ICT knowledge and were mostly willing to experience digital learning. However, some limitations were mentioned in the study which shows an urgent need for some measures to be taken for continuous training of university lecturers in ICT which in turn leads to training more knowledgeable digital generation.

This study explored the relationship among working memory (WM), speaking accuracy and length of utterance of Iranian Intermediate EFL learners. The data were collected from 38 female EFL learners whose age range was between 12 and 15 studying English at a language institute in Tehran. First, an Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was administrated to ensure the homogeneity of the participants and based on the results of the test thirty homogenous learners were selected as the main participants of the study. Next, a working memory capacity test developed by Daneman and Carpenter (1980) was administered to the participants. Later, the researcher administered a speaking test on a topic appropriate to the level of the participants which was taken from Top Notch 1 (Saslow & Ascher, 2011). Then, the researcher recorded their voices and transcribed them in order to calculate the number of lexical words the students could articulate based on a formula developed by Gilmore (2004). Speaking accuracy was also measured using a formula developed by Gilabert (2004); In fact, the students' performance was rated by two experienced teachers.  Then, the Pearson correlation formula was utilized to analyze the obtained data. The results revealed a significant correlation between working memory capacity and speaking accuracy. Based on the findings, no significant correlation was shown between working memory and length of utterance. And finally, no significant correlation was depicted between length of utterance and speaking accuracy.

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of using motivation strategies on EFL teachers’ motivation and reflective teaching. In order to do this, 30 Iranian female EFL teachers who were the researcher’s colleagues and expressed their willingness to participate in this study were selected. The group filled out a reflective teaching questionnaire by Akbari, Behzadpour, and Dadvand (2010) and motivation strategies questionnairre by Chastain (1988) as the pretest at the outset of the study and subsequently sat for a workshop where the researcher introduced motivation strategies and techniques to them. Following the end of the workshop, the teachers went back to their routine teaching program for 15 sessions and the researcher administered the reflectivity questionnaire and motivation strategies questionnaire as the posttest to the 30 teachers after those 15 sessions. In order to test the null hypotheses, that is to check any significant difference in the degree of the reflective teaching and motivation of the group prior to and after the treatment, a paired samples t-test was conducted in this research. The results revealed that there was a significant difference between the participants’ scores on the motivation pretest and posttest; favoring the posttest. Also,there was a significant difference between the participants’ scores on the reflective teaching pretest and posttest, favoring the posttest. Therefore, the results showed that motivation strategies significantly affect the teachers’ motivation and reflective teaching.