درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This study tried to compare the possible differences between female and male EFL students with respect to the use of lexical hedges in their academic spoken language. To fulfil this objective, 40 Iranian upper-intermediate EFL learners majoring in TEFL were chosen from Islamic Azad University of Abadan, Iran. The selected participants were assigned into two equal groups namely male group (n=20) and female group (n=20). Then, five discussion sessions in a single gendered context were separately recorded for male and female participants. Frequency counts and chi-square were used to analyze the obtained data. By utilizing the framework of hedges, it is deduced that that there are differences among female and male respondents’ propensity in selecting word of lexical hedges. Female responders tend to utilize more lexical hedges than male responders. In such manner, most frequently lexical hedges of fillers such as; hmm, uhh, you know, yeah were used most frequently by female respondents in their utterances; while male respondents most repeatedly utilized lexical hedges of fillers like; I think, uhh, yeah in their utterances. Female respondents had broad range variegation in picking words of lexical hedges while male respondents were not sufficiently productive in selecting the words of lexical hedges. It was demonstrated by the number of lexical hedges applied in giving viewpoints in debate and discussion context.

Teacher education is deemed to play a critical role in revolutionizing any education system. As a result, pre-service teacher education has received considerable attention in education systems world over. In the context of Iran, the process of teacher education has not been properly implemented and following their being recruited teachers would go directly to classes, without possessing adequate professional competencies. Hence, the present study intends to provide a comparative account of EFL pre-service teacher education in Iran and five other countries attempting to address applicable issues, criticisms, and constructive lessons to be learned from the relevant experiences of such countries. To this end, the study examines recruitment requiremnets, EFL teacher professional preparation and evaluation, and teaching practice in the Iranian context and those of other countries.In so doing, this study analyzed the existing documents and reports published by international and governmental organizations and previous research done relevant to the countries included in the study. The results indicated that almost all the five countries bear some resemblance to one another in pre-service teacher recruitment requirements. Iran and Japan, however, seem to have a more sensitive stance on teachers and conducting interviews with candidates than other countries.  Moreover, Germany and the U.S. appear to have built up a more sophisticated teacher education system compared to other countries. The results further revealed that the TEP program in Iran has made arrangements to keep up with the new trends in teacher education and has partly been successful in following in developed countries’ footsteps.

In view of the fact that pre-service teachers’ critical reflection through evaluating teaching activity of their peers is an important part of practicum activity, the current study aimed to analyze the recall and reflection journals written by pre-service teachers to identify and evaluate the discoursal features of their journals. To this end, a total of 272 recall and reflection journals written by pre-service teachers were analyzed on the basis of Hiebert, Morris, Berk, and Jansen's (2007) framework for analyzing their teaching practices. The findings indicated that the discourse of recall and reflection journals written by pre-service teachers is affective and descriptive rather than critical. Pre-service teachers predominantly ignore learners in writing their reflection journals. The findings of this study pointed to the need for explicit instruction of the discoursal features of reflection in teacher education classes. Therefore, teacher educators should help pre-service teachers to develop effective reflective discourse in practicum courses.

This paper introduces a set of English grammar symbols that the author has developed to enhance students’ understanding and consequently, application of the English grammar rules. A pretest-posttest control-group design was carried out in which the samples were students in two girls’ senior high schools (N=135, P ≤ 0.05) divided into two groups: the Treatment which received grammar lessons with grammar symbols; and the Control which received grammar lessons without the symbols. The experiment lasted for 30 hours spanned in three months. The statistical test revealed a significant higher gain scores for the Treatment group. Thus, the author strongly recommends using these symbols (or similar ones with the same characteristics) at least for two reasons. Firstly, students do not have to memorize all of them (72 tense symbols and 50 other symbols). That is, with just a few rules to learn, and then applying the existing algorithm, other symbols are easily shaped. Secondly, using these symbols enables teachers and students to have a general idea as to what to expect next because several grammatical rules and formulae can be predicted in advance.