درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This study examined Iranian EFL learners’ preferences regarding oral Corrective Feedback (CF) in a TOEFL speaking course. A 30-item questionnaire was administered to 32 participants in a TOEFL preparation course to elicit EFL learners’ views concerning their CF expectations. The results showed that based on the nature and objective of the course, students cared about their accuracy while fluency for these students was of secondary importance. Therefore, CF was regarded as crucial and necessary by the participants and they considered their grammatical errors as the most important one to be corrected followed by vocabulary and pronunciation errors. In terms of CF type, explicit and delayed corrective feedback were the most preferred error correction forms. Furthermore, males preferred their teacher to correct them, females favored self-correction and peer correction more than males. Finally, it can be concluded Attitudes to different feedback types and types of errors that they prefer to be corrected were mostly affected by the nature and the objective of the tasks and the course in general.

The application of zone of proximal development (ZPD), as a major tenet of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (SCT, 1978), has recently been invited in the L2 learning/teaching profession. This study mainly examined whether Iranian EFL learners’ interactions in diverse ZPD-activated proximal contexts through the use of storytelling instruction could improve their oral (speaking) proficiency and attitudes towards speaking in ZPD-based learning context. A pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design was used with 60 intermediate EFL participants selected from Asre-no English Language Institute in Iran, after administering the OQPT. Then, the participants were assigned into 2 experimental groups (ZPD-activated equal and unequal groups), and 1 control group, with 20 participants in each group. The students in both experimental groups were exposed to the storytelling-based instruction within different ZPD-activated proximal contexts (equal and unequal), but in the control group the traditional teacher-fronted instruction within a non-ZPD context was conducted. A semistructured interview and a questionnaire were used to assess the participants’ speaking proficiency and attitudes before and after the instruction. The findings from the analysis of covariance and t test suggested that using storytelling instruction within ZPD-activated contexts significantly improved both the participants’ speaking proficiency and their attitudes. Further data analysis of the ZPD participants’ performance indicated that no significant difference between the learners’ speaking proficiency development of equal and unequal peer groups was found. By implication, ZPD-based pair work and storytelling-based instruction, interwoven with each other in a balanced manner, would be highly fruitful in developing EFL learners’ speaking skill and their attitudes.

This mixed-methods study aimed at investigating the effects of a gadget-based Internet multimedia extensive reading program on promoting language proficiency. In so doing, a pretest-posttest design was applied in the quantitative phase to comparatively analyze outcomes of three classes of college-level EFL learners (two experimental groups and one control, each including 30 university students) on how much they improved in their receptive proficiency, before and after the general English language course they were taking. The first group took the General English course along with a multimedia-based Internet extensive reading program as the study’s treatment, and the second group took a linear text (traditional) extensive reading program with their English course. The posttest scores showed that students in experimental group 1 (extensive reading using multimedia texts) outperformed both experimental group 2 (extensive reading using linear texts) and the control group. Furthermore, experimental group 2 had higher scores in comparison to the control group. As for the qualitative phase, results of the follow-up interviews and open-ended questionnaires also indicated that the learners liked, and would prefer to substitute traditional reading programs by gadget-based multimedia ones. EFL teachers may be most interested in outcomes of this study since insights may be gained regarding the extent to which Internet-based reading should enter language courses.

This study aimed to overcome the researchers' extreme attention to essentially qualitative methods in research on language learners' imagined communities and move towards quantification in order to achieve a more tangible image of this construct. To do so, the present researchers followed three main phases. First, a hypothesized model of language learners' imagined communities with eight components was developed for the Iranian context based on the wide-ranging readings of the literature on imagined communities, consultations with experts and interviews with language learners. Second, a questionnaire was developed and validated based on the model to represent its components. Finally, the data collected through the questionnaire were fed into the model to see to what extent the model fit the data. The initial results showed poor values; however, the model was trimmed by removing one item from the questionnaire, and final statistical indices showed that the model was fit.

Academic literacy is a transformative approach to EAP studies that highlight the backgrounds and needs of the EAP learners in order to empower them by participating in the social practices of the international research community. From this perspective, EAP textbook development research aims to find how textbooks could empower EAP learners though considering their real needs. Accordingly , this study aims to find how EAP textbooks match/mismatch with the EAP learners’ needs. The sample of the study included 40 participants who were selected through purposeful homogeneous sampling. All participants who had passed ‘English for the Students of Science (ESS)’ as the main textbook of the EAP course completed a structured interview questionnaire that its findings were gone under content analysis and a nonparametric test of rankings themes, i.e. Friedman test. Then textbook was evaluated in terms of the established frameworks. Finally, identified themes of the interviews were compared with the content of the textbook evaluation. Findings of the study showed that EAP learners prioritized reading, writing, listening, and speaking English language skills respectively as the main language needs in the EAP community of practice. The study also found that although the design of the EAP textbook matched learners’ needs at the macro-level of needs analysis, there was little enough evidence in the content of the book that could support and match these EAP learners’ needs. The findings might have many implications for EAP textbook developers, learners, and teachers. 

The aim of this study was fourfold: (1) to investigate the effect of literature-based activities on the accuracy of Iranian Engineering students’ writing (2) to examine the effect of literature-based activities on the accuracy of their WhatsApp assisted writing (3) to determine whether their emotional intelligence (EI) increases through literature-based activities in a WhatsApp assisted setting and (4) to survey the effect of literature-based activities and the produced emotional intelligence on the complexity and lexical diversity of students’ WhatsApp assisted writing. In phase I, as students went through literature-based activities, no significant differences of accuracy were found; despite the fact that the mean difference and standard deviation scores were indicative of effective treatment, literature-based activities. In phase II, the results obtained from the analytic procedures of literature-based activities on the accuracy of students’ WhatsApp assisted writing showed that the experimental group showed higher accuracy of writing. In phase III, the result of emotional intelligence improvement was more remarkable in the WhatsApp assisted writing. Additionally, the WhatsApp assisted written productions were significantly more diverse in using lexis, t-units and clauses but not other parameters of complexity. The results have some implications for teachers and researchers in the ESP setting. 

The purpose of the present study was two-fold: (a) First, it examined fairness of Special English Test (SET) of Iranian National University Entrance Exam (INUEE) by analyzing Differential Item Functioning (DIF) with reading comprehension section of this test (b) second, it explored test takers’ attitudes towards possible sources of unfairness and DIF. In the quantitative part of the study the data from 10000 test takers (6820 females and 3180 males) were analyzed for gender DIF using Mantel-Haenszel (MH) technique. It was revealed that only 6 items in the reading comprehension skill showed DIF. Further analysis manifested that the effect size of DIF for all six items were category A or negligible. Moreover, qualitative interview results indicated that learners generally considered the test a fair one while some potential sources of bias such as topic familiarity, multiple-choice format of the test, topic interest, passage length, and complex structure of test items were mentioned.