درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This paper aimed at examining the Iranian EFL teachers and learners’ preferences for two types of direct oral corrective feedback, including explicit correction and metalinguistic clues, and two types of indirect oral corrective feedback, including recast and repetition. The participants included 39 teachers and 84 EFL learners, selected through purposive sampling. A scenario-based questionnaire was constructed based on Lyster and Ranta’s (1997) typology of corrective feedback (CF) for the purpose of collecting data on the teachers and learners’ preferences for the type of CF. Feedback scenarios were extracted from the literature on CF. The questionnaire was distributed to the participants by one of the researchers. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted in order to triangulate the data gathered through the questionnaire. The results of the study indicated that the EFL teachers and learners preferred direct CF more than indirect CF. The results also revealed significant differences among EFL teachers with differing levels of teaching experience (i.e., low, moderate and high). The present study drew attention to the fact that direct types of CF were preferred over others in EFL context. This study has implications for EFL teachers, learners, and material developers.

The present study investigated the effect of different types of text simplification (i.e., reducing the lexical and syntactic complexity of texts) on reading comprehension of English as a Foreign Language learners (EFL). Sixty female intermediate EFL learners from three intact classes in Tabarestan Language Institute in Tehran participated in the study. The intact classes were assigned to three experimental groups. Moreover, to homogenize the groups, the researchers administered a general proficiency test (TOEFL, 2003) to the participants. The results revealed no significant difference among the groups in general proficiency and reading ability. Then four reading comprehension texts from TOEFL test (2005) were simplified through lexical simplification, syntactic simplification or lexical-syntactic simplification techniques. The simplified texts, along with their reading comprehension (RC) questions, formed the three versions of the post-test, each version contained either lexically, syntactically or lexical-syntactically simplified texts. Each group took one version of the post-test. The scores were analyzed through one-way ANOVA. The results revealed a significant difference among the groups. The post hoc test indicated that the lexical-syntactic simplification group significantly outperformed the lexical simplification group and performed considerably better than the syntactic simplification group. There was no significant difference between the lexical and syntactic simplification groups, although the latter showed better results.

Although Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has been widely advocated by a considerable number of applied linguists and English language teachers, its implementation in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts has encountered a number of difficulties.  Reviewing the literature suggests that one of the reasons for unsuccessful implementation of CLT may be neglect of learners' beliefs in the process of learning. Using a Likert-type scale, the current study was undertaken to explore 242 Iranian EFL learners' beliefs towards six core tenets of the CLT approach: namely, the importance of grammar; the use of group work and pair work; the role and contribution of the learners; the role of the teachers in the classroom; the quality and quantity of error correction and assessment; and the role of the learners' native language in EFL classes. Analysis of the data revealed that although in some cases learners had viewpoints that opposed CLT principles, a considerable percentage of the respondents appreciated and had a high perception of CLT principles, indicating a welcoming atmosphere toward the implementation of CLT in Iran.

The present study was an attempt to investigate to what extent Iranian EFL teachers practice critical discourse analysis in the English language classroom during their teaching. To reach this aim, a 27-item questionnaire was designed and administered among 120 male and female Iranian English teachers in different language schools in Tehran. Following descriptive statistics through which the mean, standard deviation, and reliability of the questionnaire were calculated,a factor analysis was conducted to assess the construct validity of the designed questionnaire.The results of the statistical analysis clearly demonstrated the validity of the designed questionnaire.Once validated, certain within group comparisons (with respect to the demographic factors of gender, age, and educational degree) were conducted to see how the different demographic subsets of the sample responded to the questionnaire. The study also discusses the implications of such measurement for ELT and points out a number of suggestions for further study.

Many studies abroad have focused on neural machine translation and almost all concluded that this method was much closer to humanistic translation than machine translation. Therefore, this paper aimed at investigating whether neural machine translation was more acceptable in English-Persian translation in comparison with machine translation. Hence, two types of text were chosen to be translated by Google Translate. The inputs have been translated in two distinctive methods. The outputs were investigated by the descriptive-comparative human analysis model of Keshavarz. Consequently, the results revealed that approximately the same errors were found in both methods. However, semantic aspects were improved.