درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Morphological complexity is one of the dimensions of complexity that has been increasingly analyzed over the last few years. However, results from previous studies drawing on only a single text type are inconclusive. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of text types (descriptive, narrative, and expository) on the morphological complexity of essays written by Iranian English language learners. The participants included 87 lower-intermediate male and female L2 learners at six language institutes in Qazvin, Iran, who were selected from 127 language learners taking an Oxford Quick Placement test. The participants wrote on each text type in three consecutive weeks as a part of their classroom activity. The morphological complexity of verbs and nouns was separately calculated using the morphological complexity index. The data were analyzed using a series of Friedman and Wilcoxon Signed Rank Tests. The findings did not show any statistically significant differences across text types for nominal inflectional diversity; however, verbal inflectional diversity was statistically significant across text types, with narrative essays morphologically more complex than descriptive and expository essays. The findings may have theoretical and pedagogical implications for researchers and L2 teachers.

In line with the technological advancement during the last few decades, virtual learning has been addressed more widely, which affected English language teaching and learning as well. Since Covid 19 pandemic, which has resulted in the long-lasting closure of educational settings worldwide, virtual learning as the alternative of traditional education has been developed unprecedentedly. An option for virtual learning specifically for language teaching is teaching on the phone which has been mostly neglected in educational research. The aim of this study was to analyse the lived experience of 16 adult English language learners who experienced learning English through one-to-one, audio call sessions. Due to the pandemic, semi-structured interviews were conducted on the phone, which were recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed with a phenomenological approach. Many times revisions of the statements driven from the transcriptions resulted in six themes namely: a) learning on-the-phone as a new, satisfying experience, b) advantages, and c) disadvantages of one-to-one audio sessions, d) the participants’ preferences, e) the requisites of on-the-phone-learning, and f) the expectations of on-the-phone teacher, According to the result of this study, some educational recommendations for improving on-the-phone teaching are: covering four language skills through developing individualised lesson plans based on each learner’s needs and English language proficiency level; holding group video sessions along with one-to-one audio sessions; and using the facilities of messengers like WhatsApp to send audio, video and textual files to learners based on their needs and learning objectives.

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has brought about many changes and challenges in our lives, interactions, relationships, and modes of learning and teaching and helped us learn how to adapt ourselves to unanticipated conditions to survive. It stimulated universities, schools, and institutions of higher education to rethink and restructure their policies to find solutions to the problems as well as researchers all around the world to help educational systems get out of the mess. This study aimed to contribute to the body of literature and investigated the impacts of COVID-19 on English language teacher education. Convenience sampling was employed to recruit thirty student teachers as the participants of the study. To do the study, the author used semi-structured interviews, focus group interviews (n = 20), student teachers' reflective journals (n = 10), and his own reflective journals to collect the data. Grounded theory was used for data analysis. The findings of the study revealed that there was a shift from anomaly to congruity, student teachers saw the pandemic as an opportunity, they felt the need for technology inclusion, development, and promotion in their educational contexts, there was an urgent need to train teachers and learners to use technology in their contexts to keep the education running, and teachers had to reconstruct their identities and turn to formative assessment. The findings can contribute to the body of literature and prompt English language teacher education programs, teacher educators, administrators, teachers, and policymakers to consider the findings while they are designing, upgrading, reforming, and running their syllabi, curriculums, and programs.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, faculty members and students had to leave their face-to-face (FTF) classes and move into emergency distance education (EDE) contexts. Due to this drastic change in the system of education, investigating the probable effects of EDE on the quality of education seems essential. As such, this study has attempted to probe the effect of EDE on the language skills of Iranian EFL students. To do so, drawing on the maximum variation sampling, the present study embarked on a qualitative descriptive research method, triangulating data through written open-ended questionnaires and semi-structured interviews to collect data from 170 EFL students from different universities in Iran. The sample included BA students majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and English Literature, aged above 18. Using Thematic Analysis (TA), students’ responses were transcribed, codified, and interpreted. The findings of TA revealed that along with several disadvantages and challenges that Iranian EFL students experienced in EDE with regard to learning English language skills, EDE provided some opportunities and benefits for their learning. The analysis of students’ responses also indicated that they deemed speaking skill as the most negatively influenced language skill and listening skill as the most positively affected skill. Furthermore, the findings represented that most of the students held teachers and administrators responsible for the problems and challenges they experienced in EDE contexts. The findings of the present study can encourage administrators, teachers, and students to prepare themselves for EDE against the possible subsequent waves.

This study examined the effects of EFL teachers' behavior on intermediate L2 learners’ WTC in English. To this end, a proficiency test was administered to 150 female learners, and 98 intermediate learners aged 16 to 26 were recruited as the participants. Subsequently, a WTC questionnaire was distributed among them to measure their level of WTC. Moreover, interviews were carried out with 30 volunteers who agreed to participate in this phase of the study. The results of the analysis of the WTC questionnaire showed that the WTC level of the learners could be rated as above-average. Besides, the results of the interviews revealed that different kinds of teachers’ behavior affected learners’ WTC both positively and negatively: teachers’ sense of humor and rapport could positively affect learners’ WTC; on the other hand, teachers’ methods of error correction while learners’ speaking and teachers’ lack of support could negatively affect learners’ WTC. Additionally, according to learners’ perspectives, there were a number of ways through which a language teacher could increase the learners’ WTC in English such as encouraging learners to read extra-curricular topics and highlighting learners’ strengths instead of their weaknesses. Several implications were proffered at the end of the study to heighten the awareness of L2 teachers, teacher-trainers, and language institute managers regarding the issue under investigation.

The present study was an evaluation attempt to investigate the practicality of interpretation procedures proposed by Fairclough (1989) in the critical analysis of Persian texts. The evaluation was implemented on the basis of a goodness criterion, analytical induction (AI) framework developed by Silverman (1993). In so doing, we went about the interpretation of the inaugural speech made by the president of Iran, Dr. Rohani to the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 2013. The interpretation was done according to the Fairclough’s interpretation model in light of AI theoretical framework. The outcome of the study supported the practicality of the overall interpretation model in the Iranian context. However, considering Iranian special sociolinguistic context, the study also put forward some suggestions with respect to the interpretation of local coherence and text structure in the lower section of the model as well as situational context and intertextual context in upper section.  

Teacher professional development rests on the provision of knowledge, development of skills, and change of attitudes of teacher candidates and in-service teachers. Teachers’ professional knowledge, perceptions and teaching practice contribute greatly to student learning. This study sets out to investigate the relationships and inter-relationships among professional knowledge, academic self-concept and self-reported instructional practice which was found as a research gap in the literature. Using a sample of 92 pre-service TEFL teachers in Iran, a significant positive correlation was found between professional knowledge and academic self-concept. The findings also revealed that different domains of professional knowledge are not related to each other for TEFL. Finally, the obtained results indicated that academic self-concept affected instructional practice in total and at the level of sub-dimensions while professional knowledge had an effect on the two dimensions of instructional practice, namely cognitive activation and student learning support but not on the dimension of classroom management .

Online education, as a type of distance education, has attracted the attentions of administrators, instructors, and students in recent decades. In the midst of the Covid-19 epidemic, online education has become an unavoidable need. Students' participation in such programs may have an impact on their learning and achievement. The current study looked at the link between engagement and achievement in online classrooms. As a result, the study used a correlational design to address the research questions using Dixon's Online Student Engagement Scale and a researcher-created achievement exam. The questionnaire was developed in 2015 and comprises four categories and 19 items on a seven-point Likert scale. In 2020, the questionnaire was modified with Google Form and distributed to 297 students enrolled in general English courses via a university LMS. The second instrument was a 40-item test of reading comprehension developed by the researcher. The examination was created on the basis of reading theories and was given as a final exam. The one-sample t-test findings indicated that students’ achievement and engagement levels are adequate. Quantile regression revealed a strong link between top achievers’ engagement and achievement. However, bivariate correlation revealed no statistically significant link between typical students’ engagement and achievement. However, students’ level of engagement perception was satisfactory. The concept of engagement applies to high achievers but not to ordinary or low performers, making measurement error possible.

The advent of postmethod pedagogy has completely changed today's conceptualization of language teachers, and the importance of powerful teaching has increasingly gained momentum in the field of TESOL. However, contemporary English language teaching contexts suffer a dearth of a workable package to educate the much-needed autonomous postmethod language teachers who are able to have their own contextualized praxis. As such, the present research aims to nurture the required self-growth and self-development in language teachers through forming collaborative professional and critical discussion circles. Enjoying a mixed method research design whose quantitative section included a quasi-experimental design consisting of three phases--a pretest, an educational 12-week long treatment phase, and a posttest--the results of the study gained by two instruments, namely, the reflective teaching questionnaire developed by Akbari et al. (2010) and two similar language teaching episodes, bore witness to the significant changes in the level of reflectiveness of all 13 language teachers who partook in these discussion circles. Developmentally speaking, participating language teachers were found to initiate the whole process, direct it, and finally evaluate the new experiences further along the road. Hence the ideals of teacher development, self-growth and personal development, were accomplished through the study.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the acceptability of two Persian translations of Rowling's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by finding the position of each Persian translation in the literary polysystem of Iran. It also aimed to identify the most/least used translation strategies applied by each Persian translator, Morteza Madaninejad (2000) and Hamideh Ashkannezhand (2004), for translating culture-specific items (CSIs) from English into Persian. To do so, CSIs were extracted from the novel and classified based on Espindola and Vasconcellos's (2006) classification of cultural items. Then, Pederson's (2005) taxonomy of translation strategies was used to analyze the two Persian translations. The results indicated that Madaninejad preferred to use source oriented strategies. Thus, the translation he produced occupied the primary position in the literary polysystem. By contrast, Ashkannezhand had an interest in the use of target -oriented strategies. The findings have implications for translators of literary texts.