درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Stress and anxiety might be destructive factors in the learning or teaching journey. Enough research is required to overcome the difficulties and understand the depth of these problems. The aim of the current study was twofold: 1) to design and validate a scale for evaluating English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instructors’ apprehension sources and, 2) to understand the relationship between apprehension and instructors’ gender. The module consists of four factors, including, organizational, attitudinal, L2-related factors, and classroom management. A 34-item scale on a 5-point Likert scale was developed. The scale was distributed between 100 EFL instructors from English institutions in Shiraz, Iran and the score of 700 students related to each teacher was used for analysis.  The questionnaires were examined with two other experts to guarantee the content validity of the scales and descriptive and inferential statistics were calculated. The reliability of the scale was estimated by Cronbach's alpha. The correlation coefficient was also used to demonstrate the relationship between students' overall achievement scores and their instructor's apprehension scale. Independent t-test and Pearson correlation test were used to recognize the meaningful relationship between apprehension and instructor’s gender. The results showed that the scale was adequate with empirical data. Moreover, the value of correlation coefficient indicated an inverse relationship between apprehension and gender. This implies that apprehension can impede learning in both genders. However, women’s apprehension is more than men. The findings can help instructors to enhance their personality and welfare for more effective education.

This paper examined impoliteness strategies used by characters and their resulting reactions in five American comedy series. Drawing on Culpeper’s models (1996 & 2003), the comedy series were watched several times with one month interval to make sure that the impolite utterances and their reactions were put in the correct categories. The results of the study revealed that sarcasm was the most frequently used strategy among other strategies, and male and female characters were not distinct in using this strategy. However, male characters exploited the bald on record strategy more than their female counterparts. One striking result was the frequent use of offensive reactions by male actors. The reasons behind the variable use of these strategies are twofold. First, impoliteness is used as a tool to show off the power of the male characters. Second, using impoliteness strategies in comedy series reflect the entertaining role of sarcasm used by the actors.

Various types of focalization are important elements in creating suspense and surprise. This study finds use of narrative discourse analysis in order to discover the narrative affordances and limitations of internal focalization for creating suspense and surprise in Persian detective novels, specifically, Esmail Fassih’s The Falcon and the Owls . Duality (the existence of two temporal sets in the structure of the narrative), raising implicit questions in the first and other scenes of the novel, flashback, flashforward, different types of internal and external conflicts, spatial limitation of the focalizer and the suspense after the surprise are some of the affordances and limitations of the internal focalizer in creating suspense and surprise. In The Falcon and the Owls , the most significant strengths of the internal focalizer are the extensive attention given to narrative affordances such as raising implicit questions in the first and other scenes of the novel as well as going back and forth in time; while its weaknesses include giving insufficient attention to the tactic of multiple internal focalization, paying unnecessary attention to unimportant omissions and omitting important events.

This study focuses on complexity matching and lexical matching to investigate speech convergence in the conversations of bilingual Persian-English speakers in three language conditions namely Persian, English, and mixed in the context of lingua receptiva as an attempt to investigate such matching mechanisms between a Latin-based language and a non-Latin-based language. Complexity matching investigates convergence in terms of the hierarchical temporal structure of human speech while lexical matching explores convergence in terms of the frequency occurrence of the matched lemmas. For this purpose, 14 master’s students from the Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz majoring in English language conversed with one another in dyadic groups in three language conditions each of which had its own topic namely movies, music, and books. In complexity matching, Allan Factor analysis in terms of multiscale clustering of onset events was considered. In lexical matching, the focus was on the distribution of all lemmas and matched lemmas and the possible correlation between the two. The results revealed a gradual increase in Allan Factor log-log plots in relation to the longer timescales that correspond with discourse patterns for complexity matching. For lexical matching, the positive correlation between all lemmas and matched lemmas (r<sub>s = .607) suggested that as participants talked to each other more, they unconsciously tried to match their psychological perceptions with each other more. This suggests that speech convergence is vigorous in both bilingual and monolingual interactions.

Given the prevalence of COVID-19 pandemic and consequently the emergence of more online courses throughout the world, exploring teachers’ views about the shift from face-to-face to online environments seems significant. The objective of this study was thus twofold: (a) to investigate the roles EFL teachers take and (b) to determine competencies required to teach online English language courses. Mixed-methods research was conducted, and the participants were 100 MA students of TEFL at Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST). The required data were collected through administering two questionnaires, adapted by the researchers, on online teacher roles and competencies along with two open-ended questions. After carrying out descriptive statistics for the quantitative data and theme-based analysis for the qualitative ones, the results indicated that online teaching roles could be hierarchically ranked as pedagogical, professional, administrative, social, assessment, technological, and researcher. With regard to online teacher competencies, pedagogical, professional, and technological role competencies received the highest mean, while the researcher role competencies gained the lowest one. Pre-service EFL teachers held the view that having knowledge of technology and its use, knowledge of course/content, ability to sustain learners' motivation, online teaching skills, and ability to communicate were other competencies teachers require to fulfill their roles in online English language courses. The findings can provide more insights into how to redesign and map online teacher professional development courses to better prepare potential EFL teachers and boost their quality as online EFL teachers.

The well-established affiliation of metadiscourse research tradition to the philosophy of ESP raises some inevitable expectations on how much and how well the concept has been geared to meet the practical necessities of academic writing pedagogy. In light of such an expectation, a corpus of 35 academic writing coursebooks published during the last three decades were evaluated in terms of the possible realizations of key resources of interaction in pedagogical tasks. Due to its theoretical rigor and analytically operationalized nature, Hyland’s model of metadiscourse (2005a) was taken as the guiding framework for the current evaluation. The quantitative findings emerging from the analysis of the corpus did not sound sufficiently promising, suggesting that that theoretical developments have not yet been ideally translated into pedagogical designs; however, the rich range of resources identified in the tasks (i.e. the fifty five categories emerging from the evaluation of the corpus) suggest that the rigorous tradition of research in metadiscourse has contributed to the effective operationalization of the concept for pedagogical objectives. It has been argued that through the effective introduction of the concept of metadiscourse into pedagogical designs and its appropriate operationalization, novice participants of academic/scientific discourse communities would be enabled to redefine the nature of academic communication and get rid of a large number of misconceptions which have become fossilized through long years of the dominance of a positivistic thinking.

The present study sought to find the most frequent lexical bundles, particularly the token of the bundles, in the introduction and discussion sections of Civil Engineering research articles. It also aimed to examine the forms or types of lexical bundles found in the introduction and discussion sections of the articles. To this end, a quantitative analysis was performed on the use of two-to-five-word lexical bundles, followed by a qualitative analysis of their functions and structures based on the structural taxonomy of lexical bundles proposed by Biber, Conrad, and Cortes (2004). AntConc, as a corpus analysis tool, was employed for the extraction of lexical bundles as well as the examination of their types and tokens. Likewise, concordancers and word and keyword frequency generators were used for the analysis of word clusters and lexical bundles.   A total of 790 lexical bundles in the introduction section and 279 lexical bundles in the discussion section were analyzed based on a set of pre-established criteria (e.g., the frequency cut-off of 20 per million words) . The findings revealed that the lexical bundles consisted largely of two-word strings, and the five-word strings were the fewest. Regarding the structural classification of bundles, phrasals were the most frequent ones, whereas clausal on es were the least frequent ones. The study carries important implications, especially for materials developers and course designers who may hopefully benefit from the results in designing EAP materials finely tailored to the linguistic needs of Civil Engineering students.

This study was conducted to explore the effects of genre-based writing instruction on thesis proposal writing self-efficacy and writing quality. Twenty-two graduate students majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language participated in the study. Drawing on Bandura's (2006) guidelines, we developed a proposal writing self-efficacy questionnaire, which students completed at the beginning of the semester and the end of one semester. They wrote a preliminary proposal at the beginning of the semester, that is, before being exposed to a genre-based approach. For one semester the students’ awareness was raised concerning the generic structures of the sections included in the thesis proposal and relevant lexico-grammatical features were highlighted. Students initially showed strong writing self-efficacy, which significantly increased at the end of the semester. They also showed remarkably significant improvement in their proposal writing skills. Students’ pre-instruction skills perception was higher than their proposal quality, which may be attributed to their lack of knowledge of academic writing conventions. However, after receiving genre-based instruction, their proposal quality surpassed their level of self-efficacy. The results of this study are discussed, and implications of the study are provided.

The present study is a methodological synthesis aiming to evaluate the adherence of Iranian L2 papers to the study quality standards. Ten Iranian journals were selected based on the latest ranking of Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology (MSRT), and all experimental papers (N = 367) published from their beginnings were explored for study quality with regards to sampling, design, statistical tests, reporting practices and data sharing, and visual presentation. In the evaluation of the papers, the protocols proposed by Gass and Plonsky (2011) and Pagout and Plonsky (2017) were moderated and some recent issues proposed by APA’s (2018) Journal Article Reporting Standards and some scholars (e.g., Hu & Plonsky, 2019; Khany & Tazik, 2019; Larson-Hall, 2017) were added. The results showed that while there were issues, like acceptable sample size, use of pre-testing, reporting descriptive and inferential statistics, and ensuring the reliability of instruments, that were acceptably adhered to quality standards, problematic areas existed in all five facets of quality, and the majority of them stayed constant or changed slightly over time. The shortcomings caused by such lack of adherence are discussed to identify the challenges in the way of improving the papers’ quality. Although the results are obtained from a specific context, the implications may be generalizable to other contexts where English is taught and researched as a foreign language .

This paper reports on an investigation of native language-based differential item functioning (DIF) across the subtests of Iranian Undergraduate University Entrance Special English Exam (IUUESEE). Fourteen thousand one hundred seventy two foreign-language test takers (including four groups of Azeri, Persian, Kurdish, and Luri test takers) were chosen for the study. Uniform DIF (UDIF) and Non-uniform DIF (NUDIF) analyses were conducted on data from the four versions of IUUESEE. After establishing the unidimensionality and local independence of the data, DIF findings showed that Luri test takers were more advantaged than other native language groups across the subtests. NUDIF analysis uncovered that almost all subtests functioned in favor of low-ability test takers who haven’t been expected to outperform high-ability test takers. A probable explanation for native language-ability DIF was that Luri and low-ablity test takers were more likely to venture lucky guesses. Thoughtless errors and guessing, test-wiseness, overconfidence, stem length, unappealing distractors, and time were proposed as possible causes of DIF in IUUESEE. It was also found that the reading subtest included the large number of items with significant DIF.

This quantitative study aimed to investigate Iranian EFL student teachers’ perceptions on the use of Machine Translation (MT) for foreign language learning in academic context. To this end, 107 EFL student teachers from a women-only state university in Tehran, Iran, completed a recently developed and validated questionnaire in the field. The findings revealed that most participants were familiar with digital technology including MT and its different types such as Google Translate (GT). Satisfied with MT output, the majority of the participants in the study installed MT apps on their smartphones or used its website on their computers to complete assignments or to translate from Persian to English and vice versa. However, they were neutral about whether their instructors confirmed their MT use, or whether they preferred their teachers know they use MT or not. They were also not sure whether consulting MT was against the regulations. The results showed that authorities in the field of foreign language teaching are required to take a positive stand on this emerging technology; in addition, considering the importance of training for both instructors and learners, they should hold workshops for more responsible and effective MT implementation. 

Despite many studies on the concept of learner autonomy and the relationship between teacher autonomy (TA) and learner autonomy, scant attention has been devoted to TA on its own. To bridge this gap, the present study used narrative accounts to discover language teachers’ autonomy in terms of self-directed professional development (PD), capacity for self-directed PD, and freedom from control over PD. To this end, eight English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers narrated their past stories regarding these three dimensions. The thematic analysis of their narratives showed that their main activities for self-directed PD included peer observation, peer coaching, making use of technology, continuing education, action research, interacting with professionals, and attending workshops. Regarding capacity for their self-directed PD, the teachers claimed they had the capacity and willingness to self-direct their teacher learning. External support, experience, motivational factors, and reading books and articles were instrumental in teachers’ capacity development. Moreover, the findings revealed that although teachers viewed financial problems, conference attendance, lack of time to do PD activities, and rules of the institutes as obstacles to their freedom over PD, they employed strategies to change them into opportunities. The findings suggest implications for teachers and teacher educators to acquaint themselves with different PD strategies and to raise teachers’ awareness about the value of PD, respectively. The findings might bear implications for institute managers as well.