مودت سعیدی

Circulation of scientific discoveries occurs in various discourse communities. Adopting an audience-oriented view of writing (Hyland, 2010) and drawing on the appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005), the current study aimed to explore the evaluative strategies psychologists would use to share their specialist knowledge with scholarly and non-scholarly readers. To this end, a corpus of 38 academic research articles and 38 popularized science articles from the archive of an English international refereed journal, Current Psychology , and two English popularized magazines, Newsweek and New Scientist , were analyzed in terms of attitude resources of appraisal, namely appreciation, affect, and judgment . The results of the study revealed that palpable degrees of persuasion were achieved through including certain attitude elements in both corpora despite no statistically significant difference. The results debunked the myth of objectivity in academic discourse and disclosed the psychology experts’ appealing to persuasive tools for convincing the specialist and non-specialists of the truth value of their research outcomes. The findings carry pedagogical implications for English for the students of psychology courses. Indeed, future psychologists need to get familiar with the common discursive strategies to address their intended audience in academic and non-academic settings.

The current study attempted to investigate and compare the perceptions of Iranian in-service hard disciplines, soft disciplines, and English teachers of their prognostic, formative, and summative assessment literacy. To this end, a total number of 282 high school teachers (94 teachers from each disciplinary groups) were asked to complete the modified and validated version of Rahimi and Rastgoo’s (2017) questionnaire. To enrich the quantitative phase, 90 teachers (30 ones in each group of disciplines) were also interviewed. The results of one-way ANOVA and multiple comparisons revealed a significant difference between hard disciplines and English teachers in terms of their prognostic and summative assessment literacy. However, no significant difference was found among the three groups in terms of their formative assessment literacy. The content analysis of the interviews cast light on the commonalities and discrepancies of assessment perceptions and practices depending on the teachers’ disciplines. The findings can be transferred to teacher education programs to enhance the teachers’ subject-specific assessment competencies. 

The current study aimed to investigate the representation of critical thinking in English for the Students of Medicine (II) and the status of the EAP students’ critical thinking ability as its main users. Peterson’s model was used to identify different types of critical reading questions. Furthermore, 150 students of medicine, as the main users of the textbook, completed a critical thinking questionnaire. The results revealed that a large proportion of the exercises in this textbook reflected Vocabulary in Context and Literal Comprehension questions while Extended Reasoning questions, as the major category catering for critical reading, constituted only five percent of the whole items. The results of an independent sample t-test also indicated a moderate level of critical thinking ability among the EAP students of medicine regardless of their gender. The findings call for revisiting the English for Medical Purposes materials and incorporating more activities and exercises gearing to higher-order cognitive skills and critical thinking ability to empower the EAP students with the required set of skills to be successful in their academic and professional communities.

Reading passages act as the locus of comprehensible input in the English language teaching materials and are mostly followed by a host of activities to ensure the learners’ comprehension. The current study aimed to carry out a comparative evaluation of Vision 3 and Learning to Read (i.e., English for Pre-university Students) in terms of the reading sections. To this end, Freeman’s taxonomy of reading comprehension questions was used. To enrich the quantitative data, thirty-two English teachers were also interviewed. The results revealed the prevalence of Language questions in both textbooks. However, the least common types of questions were Affect and Content in the old and new textbook, respectively. The results of Chi-square tests unfolded a significant difference between the two textbooks in terms of three categories of questions. The analysis of the teachers’ responses corroborated the findings of the quantitative phase. The teachers seemed satisfied with the inclusion of more Affect questions in Vision 3; nevertheless, they believed that the new English textbook needed to be revised in terms of the quantity and quality of reading texts and tasks in order to shape and expand the students’ reading comprehension skills. The findings carry pedagogical implications for the materials developers and English teachers.

The current comparative study aimed to juxtapose the newly compiled English textbook for the students in the third grade of senior high school, Vision 3, and the previously taught English textbook for pre-university students. To this end, 130 experienced teachers, with the experience of teaching both textbooks, were asked to complete an eclectic checklist comprising 38 items and evaluating the book in terms of nine major criteria, namely general considerations, vocabulary, grammar, speaking, listening, reading, writing, pronunciation supplementary materials, tasks, and activities. Following that, 20 teachers were interviewed to enrich the results of the quantitative data. Overall, the results revealed the teachers’ contentment with the newly developed English textbook. In particular, the mean values indicated that English teachers rated the speaking and listening sections as the most satisfactory parts while they ranked the supplementary materials criterion as the least satisfactory one in Vision 3. Indeed, they believed that notwithstanding the dramatically positive changes in Vision 3, the book still requires undergoing major revisions to act as a rich source for enabling the EFL students to communicate fluently, accurately, and effectively. In this regard, the findings would benefit the materials developers to locate the areas for further modifications.

The current study aimed to explore the nature of discursive strategies academics would use to share their specialist knowledge to both specialists and non-specialists. To this end, a corpus of 40 academic research articles and 40 popular science articles were randomly selected from the archive of four English international peer-reviewed journals and four English popular magazines and newspapers in the field of Nutrition. Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005), a discourse framework to examine evaluative and/or persuasive language, was used to analyze the data. The results revealed significant areas of similarity and difference in terms of certain discursive elements leading to discernible degrees of persuasion. The findings imply that in order to develop a scientifically literate society, scientists should appeal to diverse discourse resources to provide the public with their findings in an informative and entertaining way. The results of the study carry some pedagogical implications for EAP courses held in EFL settings since being able to both comprehend and produce scientific texts of different professional levels at international scale seems to be a requirement for the future scientists.

The current study aimed to investigate the relationship among English for academic purposes instructors’ interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence types, language teaching anxiety, and classroom management beliefs taking a correlational research design. To this end, a convenient sample of 98 EAP instructors were asked to complete the excerpted sections of McKenzie’s Multiple Intelligences Questionnaire, Teacher Anxiety Scale, and Behavior and Instructional Management Scale. The results of Pearson product-moment tests revealed a significant negative relationship between interpersonal intelligence and classroom management beliefs while no significant link was observed between intrapersonal intelligence and classroom management beliefs. The same results were obtained for the possible relationship between these two intelligence types and language teaching anxiety. Furthermore, a significant negative relationship was found between EAP instructors’ language teaching anxiety and classroom management beliefs. The multiple regression analysis also showed that interpersonal intelligence could strongly predict EAP instructors’ classroom management beliefs. Furthermore, the two independent samples t-tests demonstrated that language and content instructors differed with regard to their language teaching anxiety and classroom management beliefs in EAP classes. The results were discussed in light of previously existing literature and some pedagogical implications were presented for EAP teacher training courses.

The learners’ ability to write a well-organized argumentative essay has gained prominence within the last decades. The multiple intelligences play a significant role in enhancing the precision of both language and thought during the writing process. The current study aimed at investigating the possible relationship between linguistic and logical intelligences and the frequency of informal fallacies and evidence types in Iranian EFL learners’ argumentative essays. To the end, a total of 110 upper-intermediate EFL learners were asked to respond to the relevant items of Multiple Intelligences Developmental Assessment Scale (MIDAS) and to write an argumentative essay. The informal fallacies and four categories of evidence were identified using two models of argumentation. Among several categories of informal fallacies and evidence, only statistical evidence was absent in argumentative essays. The results of Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient revealed a significant relationship between the participants’ linguistic and logical intelligences and the frequency of informal fallacies and evidence types in their argumentation. However, no significant difference was found between male and female EFL learners in terms of the frequency of informal fallacies and evidence types in their argumentative essays. The findings contribute to enhancing the efficiency of writing materials and courses by considering the learners’ individual differences.

Written Teacher Feedback (WTF) aims at improving the students' writing. Hence, the way in which it is provided for the learners should be taken into account as it makes an impact on the learners' comprehension of the presented comments (Ferris, 2003; Thonus, 2002). The current study was conducted to examine the possible effect of WTF directness types on Iranian EFL learners' ability to perceive the teachers' comments as praise or criticism and the required correction implied in them. To this end, three versions of the same essay, with direct, indirect and hedged comments indexed within them were distributed to 120 EFL learners. The results of ANOVA revealed that the directness type of the WTF would make no significant impact on Iranian EFL learners' ability to perceive the positive and negative comments and their required correction accurately. We might speculate from the findings that writing instructors should focus more on the quality of the WTF rather than its directness type in Iranian context. This would hopefully empower the learners to apply the teachers' comments to enhance the quality of their written products.