درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

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.

Reviewing the literature indicated that no validated model was found that examine the extent to which teachers support their students emotionally in EFL classrooms. Therefore the present study elaborated on this issue through developing and validating a teacher emotional support scale in an Iranian English foreign language context. Main components of the scale have been specified based on Hamre and Pianta's (2007)theoretical framework. A large number of items were created primarily based on operational definitions of each component. After reviewing the items by a group of experts, the questionnaire was piloted and tested on a sample of 324 EFL teachers. Finally, the researchers evaluated the validity of the questionnaire through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis.The results of the reliability of the questionnaire estimated through Cronbach’s alpha were 0.833. 17 items have been removed from analysis resulting in identifying 4 factors in exploratory factor analysis. The model was evaluated using AMOS 22 also indicated that the model was fit the data.the current study contributes to the field of English language education through designing and validating new instrument to assess teacher emotional support in EFL classrooms. Researchers and other practitioners who are involved in teaching English language can assess the extent to which teachers support students emotionally in similar pedagogical EFL context using this instrument. They also need to encourage teachers to improve their emotional skills by participating in teacher training courses.

Language learners have frequently been classified according to individual difference variables such as aptitude, personality, cognitive style, and motivation. However, a language teacher’s view seems to have been missing from such classifications. This exploratory research investigated whether and by which criteria Iranian EFL teachers classify their students. Based on preliminary interviews with 29 high-expertise Iranian EFL teachers, 21 criteria were identified and included in a questionnaire that was completed by 175 Iranian EFL teachers. The respondents almost unanimously agreed that they did classify their students according to their understanding of the character type, behavior patterns, and achievement patterns of their students. Then they rated the 21 criteria on a scale from 0 to 4 according to how important each classification criterion was for them. Factor analysis of questionnaire responses revealed six major classification criteria. Subsequently, in a case study, 26 EFL students in a typical Iranian high school class were asked to rate their classmates according to the six major criteria. Only five of the criteria were found to predict English achievement and Grade Point Average (GPA). A cluster analysis of the students’ peer ratings using the five criteria generated three clusters. An ANOVA revealed that the three clusters were accurately differentiated not only on the clustering criteria but also on the two non-clustering variables: EFL Achievement and GPA.