درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Communicative language use largely entails regular patterns consisting of pre-constructed phrases or sequences. These sequences have been examined by many researchers to find the situation-based formulas which may help L2 learners follow a possibly more target-like speaking system. This study, therefore, explored two categories of formulaic expressions including speech formulas and situation-bound utterances used by EFL learners. The randomly selective participants included 30 intermediate and 30 advanced learners, who performed a total number of 120 role-play tasks focused on the situations which required the use of thanking, requesting, offering, and apology speech acts. Audio-recorded data from role-plays were transcribed and analyzed based on existing lists of speech formulas. Results showed that the participants produced more than 102 types of formulaic sequences that could be called “a list of pragmatic routines for thanking, requesting, offering, and apologizing speech acts in the EFL context”.  This list includes 44 and 58 speech formulas and situation-bound utterances, respectively. Results further indicated that advanced language learners used more diverse situation-bound utterances in terms of its internal and contextual complexity than their counterparts in the intermediate group due to expert judgments. Because these formulas can increase coherence in speaking, and enhance effective and natural communication, their instruction could be part of the language teaching curriculum.

Washback refers to the effect of testing on teaching and learning. The university entrance exam for Iranian MA candidates of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (hereinafter TEFL MA UEE) is a nationwide high-stakes test administered every year, and significant decisions will be made based on the examinees’ performance on this exam; therefore, it is prone to bring about degrees of washback at the micro and macro levels. This study was an attempt to examine the washback effect of TEFL MA UEE on Iranian lecturers’ classroom activities. Therefore, a mixed-method approach was used to collect, analyze, and integrate both quantitative and qualitative data in order to obtain a better grasp of the research topic and to enhance validity and reliability of the information. Based on a sequential design, two phases of data collection were conducted with a two-week interval. In the first phase, a valid and reliable researcher-made questionnaire was administered to a sample of 16 Iranian university lecturers. In the second phase, five lecturers agreed to be interviewed. For this purpose, an interview protocol was developed and it was checked for the validity and reliability. The findings showed that TEFL MA UEE did not induce a high level of washback on the lecturers’ classroom activities and their teaching methodology. The findings could have practical implications for TEFL MA UEE constructors and policymakers in Iran and could also be of use to the researchers in the field of washback studies by providing some guidelines for this complicated phenomenon.

Multiple conceptualizations of the interrelation between assessment and learning yield three notions of assessment: assessment of learning, assessment for learning, and assessment as learning. This paper aims at uncovering roles and obstacles of assessment for learning and assessment as learning in English language classrooms in Hong Kong. Grounded upon the theory of constructivism and the notion of learner autonomy, assessment for learning and assessment as learning play vital roles in supporting students’ learning and nurturing autonomous learners in English language classrooms in Hong Kong, respectively. In particular, assessment for learning provides students with achievement targets prior to assessments, communicates assessment results with students by means of descriptive feedback, and guides teachers’ future lesson planning whilst assessment as learning equips students with abilities to set personal learning goals, monitor their own learning process, and conduct self-assessment in the course of learning. For all their desirability and perceived pedagogical efficacy, seldom are these two assessment practices operationalized in the implemented curriculum in English language classrooms, where assessment of learning prevails; such actualities can largely be attributable to local teachers’ lack of motivation to modify their existing assessment practices out of their conservative conceptualization of assessments, low metacognitive awareness as well as level of English proficiency of local students, and large class sizes in local classrooms, which are construed as local contextual factors hindering implementation of the two assessment practices. The aforementioned obstacles ought to be overcome so that the two assessment practices can be promoted and implemented in local English classrooms in distinct year levels for the sake of students’ language learning.

Formulaic language and sequence as the core characteristic of real-life language and native-like fluency, has been a subject of inquiry in recent decades. The aim of the present study is to investigate the effects of two extensive reading text types, i.e., adaptive and authentic, on Iranian EFL learners’ development of lexical bundles. To this aim, 20 intermediate EFL learners were chosen to participate in a time-series experiment, in which one class received adaptive texts as their extensive reading project, while the other experienced authentic texts of graded readers. The learners were required to read texts and write summaries, out of which the frequency and percentage of lexical bundles were extracted. The results of frequency and t-tests revealed that learners who benefited from adaptive texts were more successful in lexical bundles progress. While the other group also indicated to have improved in terms of multi-word chunks, the shift was not statistically significant. It is recommended that teachers allocate more class time to explicit and implicit instruction of lexical bundles.

Foreign language learners tend to avoid phonological difficulties and simply transfer sounds whether from their L1 or any pre-existing L2. Phonological awareness (PA) gives students an active role in understanding their own potential in improving pronunciation through several methods. However, such methods are likely to be restricted to only passive learning methods, such as repetition, reading and lectures. In this study, 118 Japanese students of Spanish were tested in their articulation ability of the Spanish liquid [r] segment; the students were divided into two groups: the control group (GA), composed by 59 students, which did not undergo any special PA training, and the PA trained group (GB), composed as well by 59 students, which underwent only one PA intervention. The articulatory accuracy rate of GA for such segment after their first year of language acquisition was 27.16, while for GB it was 72.54 after the PA intervention. The improvement of GB after the PA intervention was highly significant in regard to the learners’ phonological accuracy (p < 0.001)

The studies on the merits of processing instruction (PI) and output-based instruction (OI) have mostly treated the two approaches as mutually exclusive. To address the potentials of combining interpretation and production activities, this research compared the two isolated approaches of PI and OI with two combined approaches in which processing and output tasks were used in two opposite orders suggested by the researcher, i.e. processing-output-based instruction (POI) and output-processing-based instruction (OPI). The target structure was English passives. Participants included 185 Iranian EFL students from five intact classes, with four assigned to each treatment and one comprising a control group. Results on sentence-level interpretation and production tests administered before, immediately after, and one month following instruction indicated similar improvement for the treatment groups on the first interpretation posttest, and the superiority of POI over OPI and PI over the delayed posttest. On the first production test, POI, OPI, and OI performed equally well and better than PI, while more accurate uses of the target form were observed by POI and OPI on the delayed posttest. It was concluded that the combined approaches, particularly POI, could produce more persistent outcomes by giving learners the opportunity to both process a form and produce it.

This study investigated the relationship among Iranian English teachers’ adversity quotient, personal growth initiative, and pedagogical success. The participants comprised 28 male and female English teachers and a total of 336 male and female EFL learners who attended the abovementioned teachers’ classes (12 for each teacher). Stoltz’ (1997) Adversity Response Profile (ARP) and Robitscheck’s (1998) Personal Growth Initiative Scale (PGIS) were administered among the 28 teachers while Moafian and Pishghadam’s (2009) Characteristics of Successful Iranian EFL Teachers Questionnaire (SIETQ) was administered among the 336 students. To look into the relationship and the predictability of the three aforesaid constructs, a Pearson product-moment correlation and subsequently multiple regression analysis were run following all statistical prerequisites necessary for running these parametric tests. The results demonstrated that there was a significant correlation among the teachers’ scores on the ARP and SIETQ, and their PGIS and SIETQ. Also, there was a significant difference in the predictability of the teachers’ SIETQ by their ARP and PGIS.

It is often wrongly assumed that the provision of teacher corrective feedback naturally entails learners' attendance to and application of it, but learners have repeatedly been reported not to pay attention to teacher feedback due to lack of motivation and the distracting effect of the grades they receive. The present study was an attempt to tackle this problem. To do so, the technique named Draft-Specific Scoring (Nemati & Azizi, 2013) was implemented. In DSS, learners receive both teacher feedback and grades on their first drafts; however, they are given up to two opportunities to apply teacher feedback and revise their drafts accordingly. The scores they receive may improve as a result of the quality of revisions they make. Students’ final scores will be the mean score of the grades they receive on the final drafts of each assignment. 57 Iranian intermediate students attending the ‘Advanced Writing’ course at University of Teheran, with an age range of 21 to 27 took part in this study. The gain score analysis and the SPANOVA used showed the superiority of DSS over more traditional methods in improving learners’ overall writing proficiency as well as fluency and accuracy of their written texts. Moreover, no adverse effect was observed for the treatment group regarding the grammatical complexity of their texts. This indicates that in order to make teacher feedback work, there are a number of intervening variables one needs to consider, the most important of which being learners’ motivation to attend to teacher feedback.

Researchers and scholars have been attracted by the idea of using integrated writing task along with independent writing task to best assess the EFL learners’ writing competence. This study was conducted to compare the writing performance of EFL students in integrated and independent writing tasks. It also aimed to find out if writing performance varies with task types. A number of thirty Iranian EFL students participated in this study, and each student wrote on two writing tasks of IELTS Academic module. The written essays were rated by three experienced raters using IELTS rubrics. Paired sample t-tests revealed that test takers performances did not differ significantly across these two tasks. Besides, two one-way ANOVAs indicated the difference between the raters in rating integrated writing task while they were not performed differently in rating independent task. The results are followed by a number of suggestions with the aim of improving the EFL students’ performance in writing skill.

There has been increasing interest in utilizing corpora in linguistic research and pedagogy in recent years. Rhetorical organization of different sections of research articles may appear similar in various disciplines, but close examination may show subtle differences nonetheless. One of the features that has been at the center of attention especially in recent years is the idiomaticity of a discourse which can be examined from the perspective of multi-word units captured by the automatic retrieval of lexical bundles. This study takes a corpus-based approach for the identification of lexical bundles. A corpus of 801,894 words from 790 articles was collected. In order to fulfill the purposes of the present study, ABBYY FineReader 10 professional edition, Total Assistant, Antconc 3.2.3, and WordSmith Tools 5 were used to identify lexical bundles. Then these bundles were classified structurally and functionally based on the presented taxonomies in the literature. The results of the current study indicated that the writers of medical research articles mostly rely on text-oriented bundles in the discussion section of research articles to establish academic discourse.

Although there have been several previous investigations on the role of auditory training for the development of auditory processing skills, it still remains unknown whether children with auditory processing difficulties can get improved auditory skills after exposure to a multi-modal training experience comprising both visual and tactile stimuli. The present study, therefore, attempted to use electronic game applications to foster the auditory processing skills of children who suffer from deficits in their listening abilities. For this purpose, the Listening Inventory for Education (LIFE) questionnaire was administered to the potential number of learners and those learners scoring below the mean were selected as the participants. Children were then assigned to one of two experimental groups: bottom-up (n = 15) and top-down (n = 15). Each group was required to complete a training program on an iPad, using the Auditory Workout app for top-down training and Auditory Processing Studio app for bottom-up auditory training. Their progress was recorded through their responses to the LIFE questionnaire. Results were then analyzed quantitatively through the use of an independent samples t test. Findings revealed the significant effectiveness of both bottom-up and top-down approaches in bring about enhanced auditory skills; results are further discussed with respect to the existing literature.

In L2 development, the cognitive complexity of tasks plays a crucial role in task performance and language features produced. However, there have only been few studies addressing the impact of task complexity on EFL learners' attention to L2 system and form-focused self-repairs (FFS).This study explores the role of increasing cognitive task complexity in EFL learners' form-focused attention (FFA) to L2 system (i.e. grammar, lexis, and phonology) and FFS and the effect of increasing procedural task complexity on EFL learners' FFA to L2 system and FFS. The participants comprised one hundred EFL junior students of TEFL. The sample was chosen from the cohort of EFL students at Islamic Azad and state universities in Isfahan and Shahrekod. The participants performed under task conditions of−/+ casual reasoning and −/+ planning time. After each stage, each participant filled in a Likert-type scale to examine his/her attention to different aspects of L2 system .Finally, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test was used to compare the learners’ instances of of self-repairs at un-increased and increased task complexity occasions. Repeated-Measures ANOVA was used to examine the data. Results showed an overall effect of task complexity on EFL learners' attention to L2 system and FFA behavior across task types.

Issues related to bilingualism and the effects which might have on language learners’ cognitive and meta-cognitive variables have attracted the attention of a couple of researchers in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA).Since a couple of decades ago, there has been a plethora of studies on cognitive and metacognitive differences between bilinguals and monolinguals. However, the impact of bilingualism on EFL learners’ WMC and verbal intelligence has not be explored yet. The present study aimed at comparing the WMC and verbal intelligence of bilingual and monolingual language learners. In so doing, 30 Baluch EFL learners and 30 Persian speaker EFL learners were selected through convenience sampling. The data of the study were collected through running WMC measure and verbal intelligence test. The data of the study were analyzed through running descriptive and inferential statistics tests (independent samples-t-tests). Results showed that bilingual language learners outperformed the monolingual language learners in both WMC measures and verbal intelligence test. Therefore, it could be concluded that bilingualism affects EFL learners’ WMC and verbal intelligence. The findings have theoretical implications for applied linguists and psycholinguists and practical implications for teachers and syllabus designers.