درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This study attempts to investigate the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic development of Iranian EFL learners cross-sectionally when making requests in different situations. To this end, 103 university students in three proficiency levels of pre-intermediate, upper-intermediate, and advanced were asked to write three discourse completion tests (DCTs) of requests in different situations with various social and power relation demands and 20% of them were interviewed about their DCTs. The analyses of these written and verbal reports suggested that parallel with proficiency there was a movement from directness to conventional indirectness and an expansion of the repertoire of both external and internal modification devices. Even though all the participants expressed their awareness of the sociopragmatic requirements of different request situations in their verbal reports, increasing proficiency led to the application of this awareness in practice. That is, advanced learners were more successful to differentiate among the situations both sociopragmatically and pragmalinguistically. The results are discussed in light of previous research and available developmental patterns.

The present study is an attempt to discover the relationships among reflection, role stressors and resilience. To this end, a mixed-method approach was adopted. In the quantitative phase, 122 EFL teachers completed three questionnaires namely English Language Teaching Reflection Inventory, Teacher Role Stressors Scale and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale. The results of correlation indicated that there is a significant positive relation between reflection and resilience. However, the correlation between reflection and role stressors was found to be negative. Multiple regression revealed that of the five components of reflection, metacognitive and critical reflection are significant predictors of role ambiguity while only critical reflection can predict role conflict. Metacognitive and practical reflection were also found to be significant predictors of teachers’ resilience. In the qualitative phase, fifteen face-to-face interviews were conducted with the participants who had also taken part in the first phase of the study. Data were transcribed, coded and thematically structured based on a grounded theoretical perspective. The two main themes which emerged out of the interviews confirmed that reflection leads to resilience through strengthening teachers’ professional identity while it also leads to resilience or stress through making teachers prepared and knowledgeable. The possible justifications of the obtained results as well as the implications of this study for teaching English and teacher education in EFL context are discussed.

The study aimed to investigate the relationship between process writing (PW) and critical thinking (CT) ability of Iranian EFL learners. Furthermore, the role of PW in the enhancement of CT was investigated. In so doing, 65 upper-intermediate language learners were selected from Rasht Islamic Azad University based on convenience sampling. The results of the pretests indicated that participants were homogeneous regarding language proficiency as determined by Babel test, CT by Watson-Glaser critical thinking appraisal (W-GCTA), and writing ability by a writing test. By implementing a quasi-experimental design, the participants were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The experimental group received a step-by-step process of teaching CT and utilized CT skills in developing an essay. The control group, in contrast, merely practiced PW. After applying the non-parametric Spearman rank-order correlation, the results revealed that there was a significant correlation between PW and CT ( rs =.632, p <.05). The results of the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test substantiated that there was a significant difference in CT ability of control and experimental groups ( U =.000, p <.05), revealing that PW is a vehicle of CT, not an ingredient.

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.

This study investigated the relationship between classroom environment and teacher behavior, and EFL (English as a foreign language) learners’ engagement and state motivation. To do so, 110 intermediate Iranian EFL learners with an average age of 18.37 were asked to complete What is Happening Inside the Classroom scale (WIHIC), Questionnaire for Teacher Interaction (QTI), Student Engagement Instrument (SEI), and Student State Motivation scale (SMS). The results of statistical analysis showed that there was a moderate relationship between all aspects of classroom environment (student cohesiveness, teacher support, equity, involvement, cooperation, and task orientation) and learners’ engagement (emotional and cognitive engagement). Moreover, there was a relationship between some aspects of classroom environment (student cohesiveness, task orientation, cooperation, and involvement) and state motivation. However, there was no relationship between teacher behavior, learners’ engagement, and state motivation. Implications are discussed and avenues for future research are outlined.

This paper reports on the findings of a research aimed at exploring the professional identity (PI) of English as Foreign Language (EFL) teacher in Iran. The research further examined the extent to which the identified PI factors affect their teaching quality. The authors argue that earlier classification of different factors of professional identity of EFL teachers is arbitrary and may only be valid by definition. The possible grouping of these factors is also examined to identify what clusters of factors have relative importance in EFL teacher's professional identity and how these clusters may contribute to the quality of teaching. Sample participants contributed in semi-structured interviews and subsequently based on the thematic analysis of the interviews a questionnaire was developed and completed by a total of 143 EFL instructors and students. Factor Analysis of data identified four distinct clusters accounted for a total of nineteen variables presenting the PI profile of EFL teacher in which Personal Characteristics (PC) emerged as the most important cluster. Consequently, five clusters identified to have a considerable effect on teaching quality, Pedagogical knowledge (PK) found to be the most influential cluster. These findings may well serve as a valuable pedagogical resource for EFL teachers and policy makers to help improve teaching quality, educational processes, and curriculum design.

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.

: This study aims to explore the relationship between syntactic and lexical complexity and also the relationship between different aspects of lexical complexity. To this end, speech monologs of 35 Iranian high-intermediate learners of English on three different tasks (i.e. argumentation, description, and narration) were analyzed for correlations between one measure of syntactic complexity (mean number of clauses per Analysis of Speech Unit) and two measures of lexical complexity (diversity and sophistication). Spearman’s rho was used to calculate correlations between the average scores for syntactic and lexical complexity obtained from the three tasks and also for each of the three tasks individually. The results showed that the average scores for lexical diversity and lexical sophistication correlated positively, but the correlation was found only for the narration task. Also, the average scores for syntactic complexity did not correlate significantly with any of the average scores for the two measures of lexical complexity. However, the pattern of results differed across the three tasks. In the argumentation task, syntactic complexity correlated significantly only with lexical diversity. Syntactic complexity did not correlate significantly with any of the two measures of lexical complexity in the description task. In the case of the narrative task, there was a significant correlation between syntactic complexity and both measures of lexical complexity. The results are discussed in light of Levelt’s (1989) speaking model