درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

A lot of studies have been done in the developed countries due to the importance of job satisfaction; however, only a limited number of studies have been conducted on English teachers' job satisfaction in Iran. Therefore, this study has been designed to recognize the amount of job satisfaction among Iranian EFL teachers regarding their gender, academic degree, and major. To do this end, both qualitative and quantitative research methods, a questionnaire, and a structured interview were utilized. To collect data, a validated questionnaire which was developed by Karavas (2010) administered to a sample of 53 males and females English teachers, teaching in different institutes, at private schools, and at universities in Genaveh Port, Bushehr Province. After gathering the questionnaires, all of the teachers were interviewed. The study findings provided the evidence that females were more satisfied than males. Moreover, the results indicated that the participants with BA/BSc significantly had higher job satisfaction than the participants with MA/MSc degree. But the comparison between the other groups did not reveal any significant difference. Furthermore, the findings clearly demonstrated that there is no significant difference between teachers' job satisfaction and their major. The results of the interview revealed that Iranian EFL teachers satisfied with their jobs because they like teaching, and the most important reason of all teachers' job dissatisfaction is their low salary.

A significant research base has increasingly substantiated that teachers are among the most significant players affecting student achievement in second language classrooms. As a result, teacher-related variables have enjoyed much research attention over the recent decades in both mainstream education and English Language Teaching (ELT). Likewise, the present study was set to test a structural model of collective teacher efficacy, teacher self-efficacy, job satisfaction, and teaching commitment, and specifically to examine the hypothesis that teaching commitment mediates the effects of collective teacher efficacy and teacher self-efficacy on job satisfaction. Using a sample of 312 Iranian EFL teachers, structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted to establish the structural model. The findings of a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) confirmed the fitness of both the employed scales and the structural model.  The findings and implications of the present study are finally discussed.

The present study is an attempt to compare the use of different forms of greeting speech acts presented in Iranian junior high school textbooks, i.e. Prospect series (I, II, III) and Four Corners series (1, 2, 3 and 4) which are quite popular in Iranian high schools and institutions. To this end, greeting forms in the language function and conversation sections of these two series were analyzed to see how they were presented on the basis of a modified version of Searle’s (1967) greeting speech act classification introduced by Hang (2010). The obtained results indicated that ‘greeting by using questions’ was the most frequent form of all greeting forms in both series. In addition, the results of chi-square revealed that there was no significant difference between the occurrence frequencies of greeting forms of speech act in the two series. The findings of the study have some implications for textbook designers in terms of incorporation of speech acts in upcoming textbooks.

The aim of the current study was to investigate whether L2 dialogue shadowing practice would have an effect on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ conversation ability. For this purpose, 30 Iranian intermediate EFL learners at Padideh language center participated in the experiment of the study. The participants were divided into two groups of 15 who were assigned to the experimental and control group of the study randomly. A pretest of conversation ability was administered to both groups, the experimental group received 10 sessions of teaching L2 conversation as well as dialogue shadowing technique (DST) while the control group received a placebo, in other words, teaching L2 conversation via existing method. After the treatment, the same test was administered as posttest to both groups of study. The data obtained from the tests in this study were analyzed via independent sample T-test between performance of the groups, and the paired-sample T-test was used between the pretest and posttest of each group to show the progress. The results revealed that Iranian EFL learners in the experimental group performed better and received higher score in conversation test after 10 sessions of treatment.

Pienemann (1998, 2015) put forward Processability Theory to enlighten why language learners follow definite developmental paths. The aim of the present study was to run a comparative investigation into the difficulty order of different grammatical structures for male and female Iranian EFL learners predicted by Processability Theory. 185 Iranian university students took part in this study. They received a Demographic Questionnaire and a Validated Researcher-Made Grammar Test designed based on the stages of Processability Theory. Item Response Theory (IRT) Rasch Modeling was used to analyze the collected data. Results pertained to the research questions revealed that the stages predicted by Processability Theory do not account for the Iranian male/female EFL learners. Another major finding emerged from the data was that the difficulty level of different grammatical structures presented by Pienneman in PT doesn’t match the difficulty order obtained in this study by male/female EFL respondents. All things considered, results of the study provided a reliable counterevidence for the assumptions of the theory.

Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) presents teaching techniques and procedures along with the underlying theory and principles and is comprehensible to readers who are new to the field of English Language Teaching (ELT). David Nunan (2015) proposes rich illustrations of theoretical constructs through providing practical examples of how to develop teaching materials and tasks from sound principles; he also presents content through various textual types including classroom vignettes which show language teaching in action, question and answer sessions. The book consists of twelve concise chapters: Language Teaching Methodology, Learner-Centered Language Teaching, Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, Pronunciation, Vocabulary, Grammar, Discourse, Learning Styles and Strategies, and Assessment.