درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present study aimed at examining the combined effects of pre-task and online planning time on complexity, accuracy, and fluency in narrative-based texts produced by Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Overall, the implemented studies in this regard point to the facilitative impacts for both pre-task and careful online planning on complexity, accuracy, and fluency with some recorded trade-off effects. Using a between-groups design, sixty homogeneous participants were randomly assigned to four performance conditions: no planning (NP), careful online planning (OLP), pre-task planning (PTP), and both pre-task and careful online planning (POLP). The findings revealed that pre-task and careful online planning don’t have any significant effects on the level of complexity. The results also suggested that whereas the provision of abundant online planning time increases the accuracy level, the opportunity to plan prior to performance leads them to generate more fluent written discourse. In addition, compared with the NP condition, pre-task in tandem with careful online planning time enable the participants to produce more accurate, and fluent written discourse that lend support to the Dual-Mode system and Limited Attentional Capacity Model. The findings are of pedagogical significance in that they speak of the efficacy of planning as an important metacognitive learning strategy capable of helping teachers achieve the desirable pedagogical objective of enhanced complexity, accuracy, and fluency of learners’ task-based production. Theoretically, the results underscore the effectiveness of planning time in helping language learners overcome the limitation of their attentional capacity and direct them towards aspects of form and meaning.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the students’ English foreign language learning anxiety and English language performance test result. Thus, the objective of the study was to assess the relationship between students’ English foreign language learning anxiety and their English language performance. To attain this objective, a descriptive survey research design was employed. Students’ first semester English final examination result was used to explore the relationship between students’ English classroom anxiety and their English performance test result. In line with this, foreign language classroom anxiety scale and the students’ language performance scores were used to collect data. One hundred and seventy six (176) first year students were involved in the study. Multiple instruments that included questionnaire and document analysis were used to gather data. Both quantitative and qualitative data analysis methods were employed to analyze the data. The findings indicated that most of the students were found to be anxious. Furthermore, the findings showed that there was a significant negative relationship between students’ English foreign language learning anxiety and their English performance test result. Also, the findings of the study revealed that anxiety is much more prevalent in line with the subjects of the study and had negative correlations with their English language performance exam result. Finally, it was recommended that EFL instructors should acknowledge anxiety feelings as legitimate and attempt to lesson students’ feelings of inadequacy and failure by providing positive experiences and feedback to counter act anxiety.

Pragmatic rating is considered one of the novel and crucial aspects of second language education which has not been maneuvered upon in the literature. To address this gap, the current study aimed to inspect the matches and mismatches, to explore rating variations, and to assess the rater consistency between the holistic and analytic rating methods of the speech act of agreement in L2 by non-native English teachers. In this regard, 12 discourse completion tests (DCTs) for agreement accompanied by EFL learners’ responses to each situation were rated by 50 non-native English teachers. Initially, they were asked to rate it holistically, and the content analysis of raters’ comments revealed twelve agreement criteria. Grammatical structure was the prominent criterion which suggested that the raters were predominantly concerned with pragmalinguistics. In particular, the results of descriptive statistics demonstrated that there was a degree of divergence in the frequency of the criteria applied. Additionally, the teachers were asked to rate the pragmatic outputs analytically which showed that the raters were more consistent in the analytic phase. Finally, the findings indicated that there was a convergence between the two rating methods. The results of the present study implicated the necessity of rater training with regard to the rubric-based pragmatic rating. This study offers crucial pedagogical implications for syllabus designers, materials developers, language testers, and some suggestions for further research studies.

Universities require highly qualified and committed instructors to carry out the significant tasks of educating the future generation of the society. The primary interest of this study was to explore the construct of teacher commitment to determine its dimensions and components and finally design EFL Teachers’ Professional Commitment Questionnaire. First, through a thorough analysis of the available literature as well as a semi-structured interview, the core dimensions and components were opted. Then, in the second qualitative phase, the researcher designed the early draft of a structured questionnaire which was handed into 25 experts. Content Validity Ratio was computed to ensure validity. Subsequently, the modified draft of the EFL Teachers’ Professional Commitment Questionnaire was designed and administered to 70 EFL university instructors to investigate the validity and reliability of the instrument employing Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling. As a result, three dimensions of Commitment to Students, Commitment to Profession, and Commitment to University along with 10 components were confirmed. The practical implication of this study is a validated EFL Teachers’ Professional Commitment Questionnaire performing as an evaluative tool to assess the level of teachers’ commitment with respect to their commitment to students, university, and profession in the EFL academic context of Iran.

This study was an analytical account of EFL postgraduate learners’ use of verbs in citing other scholars in their own writing. Particular interest was differing extents of these verbs as categorised by Myer (1997), namely verbs representing a statement of scholarly writing, verbs communicating knowledge of scholarly writing, and verbs denoting cognition of scholarly writing, each of which has subcategories. To achieve this, 40 postgraduate dissertations and theses by the University of Dar es Salaam students were purposively selected. From these citation verbs from the introduction and literature review chapters were posted to the Microsoft Excel sheets and frequencies of occurrences were computed for each verb before assigning them to their relevant categories. The findings indicate the predominance of verbs of cognition of scholarly writing (notably perception and interpretation verbs) followed by those denoting knowledge of scholarly writing (notably procedural verbs). The least used category was verbs belonging to a statement of scholarly, especially inclusive verbs with only 10 instances of occurrence.

Central to the spirit of reflective teaching is the ability to focus critically on one’s own beliefs, cognitions, and concerns. Numerous proposals have been developed for implementing reflective practices in pre-service teacher education contexts with the aim of producing highly competent reflective teachers. However, it is imperative to identify the candidates’ beliefs and knowledge base before any interventions could be introduced to effectively trigger a response. This study utilized a reflection oriented model to explore pre-service language teachers’ concerns about language learning/teaching. Interview techniques facilitated such an in-depth exploration among a conveniently sampled 13 candidates studying at a teacher college in Iran. The content analysis of the interviews revealed that affective factors, classroom management, language-related fears, and tensions between their beliefs and practices were the candidates’ major concerns. On the whole, candidates’ preexisting learning experiences seemed to cast a shadow over their cognitions and concerns. Implications regarding reflective practicums in teacher education programs are discussed.

The present study compared the effect of cooperative group feedback and cooperative group writing techniques in writing classes. Accordingly, 90 male and female intermediate English language learners sat for a sample piloted Preliminary English Test and 60 who scored one standard deviation above and below the mean were selected as the main participants. Both groups were taught the same course book. Moreover, they received the same hours of instruction and teaching aids in the same physical environment; therefore, the most significant point of departure in the two experimental groups in the present study was the form of writing practices presented in the classroom. One group underwent the cooperative group writing while the other the cooperative feedback procedure throughout the treatment period. The findings of this study based upon the results gained from an independent sample t-test run on the two groups’ posttest mean scores revealed that the participants’ L2 writing improved more significantly in the cooperative group writing class compared to the cooperative group feedback. The findings of this study may be contributory to EFL teachers and syllabus designers in the process of developing more efficient second language writing courses.

There is a bulk of studies supporting the positive effect of strategy instruction on reading comprehension. This study examined the effect of two reading strategies (i.e., false correction and inference strategy) on English reading comprehension of Iranian paramedical students, using a pretest, posttest, control group design. It also surveyed their attitudes toward the effect and usefulness of these strategies. The participants were sixty paramedical students, selected through availability sampling from the Medical University of Kashan. They were randomly assigned to two experimental groups and one control group (CG). The first experimental group was instructed to use inference strategy (henceforth IS), whereas the second was instructed to use a strategy based on elaborative interrogation theory (i.e., false correction strategy, henceforth FCS). The experimental data were collected through a researcher-made pretest and posttest, and survey data through a researcher-made questionnaire. The results of statistical analyses indicated that IS group significantly outperformed FCS and CG on the posttest. The results of questionnaire data also showed that IS led to more positive attitudes. Moreover, IS was perceived as more useful in meeting participants’ academic needs. The findings of the study imply a needs-based approach to ESP pedagogy.

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.

This study investigated a new blended approach for enhancing vocabulary achievement. To this end, the project used a convenience sample of 50 intermediate EFL learners ranging from 19-35 years of age from three intact classes studying English translation at university. They were randomly assigned to two groups of 25 students each. In the experimental group, the treatment consisted of providing photos/cartoons related to the sessions’ course of instruction on Instagram, with the learners discussing and exploring the meaning of vocabularies via peer scaffolding using metacognitive strategies. The control group followed the syllabus and assigned homework according to the class program. To investigate the vocabulary achievement of the participants, a piloted multiple-choice vocabulary posttest was administered. The results that were analyzed through independent samples T-test revealed that the blended approach could significantly affect the performance of the experimental group. This study has implications not only for teachers, researchers, and syllabus designers but also for EFL learners with unpacking the notion of metacognition and peer scaffolding, proposing an integrated framework that illustrates how it may pervade the teaching-learning process as an educational goal. The implication of this study supports student responsibility, a student-centered classroom, and higher levels of cognition.

The study examined language learning anxiety factors, hindering EFL learners’ process of learning, particularly in speaking settings and recommended useful approaches to cope with it. Using the quantitative approach as well as a qualitative semi-structured interview and focus-group discussion method, this study tried to examine the factors behind language anxiety among Iranian language learners both in the classroom and in the social context. 100 TEFL students participated in this study. The language proficiency was measured by TOEFL IBT test to make sure that the students were homogeneous. The findings suggested a variety of approaches to cope with language anxiety. It also revealed that there was a significant relationship between the participants’ language anxiety and their language proficiency. The results of the interviews showed that the teachers had a key role in increasing and decreasing the students’ language anxiety concerning psychosocial linguistic factors. The findings of the study can be helpful for providing some teacher-training courses, teaching language teachers some effective psychological techniques to decrease language learning anxiety factors, improving language learning process. Keywords: language le

Naturalization is a translation procedure that is predominantly utilized in the translation of English medical terms into Indonesian. This study focuses on identifying types of naturalization involving the adjustment of spelling and pronunciation and investigating whether naturalization has been appropriately applied based on the rules in the Indonesian general guidance of term formation. The data were taken from the translation of selected articles of a medical textbook, General Ophthalmology (2008). The findings show that naturalization in English-Indonesian medical terms occurred in four categories, namely (1) adjustment of spelling with complex adjustment of pronunciation, (2) adjustment of spelling with simple adjustment of pronunciation, (3) adjustment of pronunciation without adjustment of spelling and (4) adjustment of spelling without adjustment of pronunciation. The products of naturalization have followed the guidance yet several new adjustment standards need to be included to enrich the pattern of foreign term adoption. In addition, this study recommends that types of ‘absorption’ in the Indonesian guidance of term formation needs to be revisited in order to precisely classify how foreign term’s pronunciation and spelling adjustment is made in the Indonesian language.

This study was conducted with the purpose of examining Persian speakers’ article acquisition and use with reference to Ionin, Ko and Wexler’s (2004) model, which is based on the prediction of Fluctuation Hypothesis (FH) that EFL learners of [-article] languages, like Persian, make erroneous article use in [+definite, -specific] and [-definite, +specific] contexts. From among the students of an Iranian university, 90 participants were randomly selected and divided into three groups based on their proficiency levels (elementary, intermediate and advanced). They completed a forced-choice elicitation task, consisting of 20 dialogues, similar to Ionin et al.’s (2004) questionnaire. It was hypothesized that as proficiency level increases, the accuracy level increases, while article misuse and omission decrease. The overall results suggested that the performance of the participants of the study, even the advanced group, was below the ceiling level (90% accuracy observed in native and near-native speakers). Moreover, as the level of proficiency increased, the accuracy level of article use increased and omission error decreased, but article misuse showed no significant decrease. It was concluded that low performance of Persian speakers is due to the lack of correspondence between Persian and English determiner phrase (DP) structures and lack of adequate input.