درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The current study was conducted to investigate the effects of using Microsoft Office Word on Iranian EFL lecturers’ grammar knowledge and their attitudes towards using them to support their grammar knowledge. To this end, 14 Iranian EFL lecturers, who had M.A. degrees in TEFL, containing eight males and six females participated in this study. The participants were randomly divided into equal groups of control and experimental. The participants in the experimental group worked with Microsoft Word and the participants in the control group worked with pens and papers during the study. The participants were asked to write a text about a specific subject and express their opinions about that subject. The results were collected and perused by the help of the supervisor of the study who had a Ph.D. degree in TEFL for checking the possible grammatical errors or mistakes. The results indicated that Microsoft Word was indeed beneficial to the grammar of the participants of experimental group because they got significantly higher grammar scores than the participants of the control group did. The results of this study offer practical implications for applying computer for language teaching and improvement of EFL learners’ writing skill.

The present study examines the role of gender in reading comprehension of short stories taught through awareness-raising among Iranian EFL learners. In so doing, twelve male and eighteen female learners with lower intermediate English proficiency were selected as the research sample. Next, they were randomly divided into two fifteen-member groups (i.e., a control group and an experimental group). The control group followed the conventional methods and the experimental group was taught the same short stories using awareness-raising activities. Consequently, an independent sample t-test was run. The obtained results indicate the experimental group demonstrates a better performance than the control one. According to the means, the female learners in both groups outperformed the male ones. 

Lexical bundles, as building blocks of coherent discourse, have been the subject of much research in the last two decades. While many of such studies have been mainly concerned with exploring variations in the use of these word sequences across different registers and disciplines, very few have addressed the use of some particular groups of lexical bundles within some genres of academy. To address generic variations, this research focused on anticipatory it bundles as a particular structural group of bundles. More specifically, this study chose to investigate range, frequency, and function of these word clusters in applied linguistics research articles and postgraduate writing. Through the use of two big corpora of research articles and postgraduate theses, two text analysis programs, and a functional taxonomy of it bundles, this study found that it bundles were used relatively frequently in both published and postgraduate writing. Functional analysis showed that anticipatory it lexical bundles served a wide variety of functions in both genres investigated. This study also revealed that some anticipatory it lexical bundles commonly used by students in their postgraduate writing did not count as bundles in research articles, both in terms of variety and frequency. As for implications, the study calls for the incorporation of such clusters in L2 and/or EAP (English for Academic Purposes).

وام گیری لغات یکی از مهم ترین منابع غنی سازی مجموعه واژگان هر زبان است که ماحصل تماس با دیگر زبان ها است. در این مقاله وام واژه های مربوط به حوزه معنایی «خوراک» از لحاظ آوایی و معنایی در زبان های روسی و فارسی بررسی شده است. مؤلفان سعی کرده اند تا ورود مستقیم و یا غیرمستقیم وام واژه ها را از یک زبان به زبان دیگر معین کنند. بیش از دویست واحد واژگانی از منابع و فرهنگ های گوناگون جمع آوری و تحلیل شده است. در نتایج به دست آمده، گذشته از وام گیری های رایج و استاندارد، شاهد وام گیری های غیرمتعارف و ترکیبی نیز هستیم که در آن ها تک واژهایی از زبان های گوناگون با هم تلفیق شده اند. همچنین معلوم شد بیشترین شمار وام واژه ها از زبان فرانسوی و سپس انگلیسی گرفته شده اند و زبان های دیگر در رده های بعدی قرار دارند.

Using a mixed methods design, the present study attempted to identify the factors influencing Iranian untrained EFL raters in rating group oral discussion tasks. To fulfil this aim, 16 language learners of varying proficiency levels were selected and randomly assigned to groups of four and performed a group discussion task. Thirty two untrained raters were also selected based on their volunteer participations. They listened to the audio files of the group discussions and assigned a score of one to six to each language learners based on their own judgments. They also provided comments on each language learners’ performance pointing to why they assigned such scores. The researchers had an interview with the raters after the rating session as well. The quantitative phase investigated whether linguistic features of accuracy, fluency, complexity and amount of talk were attended to by the raters in terms of having any relationship to the scores the raters assigned. Speech rate as an index of fluency and amount of talk turned out to be significantly correlated with the scores. Of more importance was the qualitative phase with the aim of identifying other factors that may account for the scores. The comments provided by the raters on each score and the interviews were codified based on Content Analysis (CA) approach. It was found that the raters attend not only to the linguistic features in rating oral group discussions, but they are also sensitive to the interactional features like the roles the participants take in groups tasks and the overall interaction patterns of the groups. The findings of this study may shed light on group oral assessment in terms of training the raters rating group oral tests and developing rating scales specific for group oral assessment.

The bulk of research within the interactionist framework seems to be consensually pointing to the beneficial effects of interaction in SLA. However, few studies have investigated the role of training in providing and perceiving interactional feedback, especially among young learners. This study probed the effects of training prior to engagement in interaction in case of young learners acquiring polar questions in an EFL context. Sixty learners aged 9-14 in three intact groups were exposed to instruction followed by peer interaction in case of the experimental groups while the control group simply received traditional teacher-fronted practice. Also, while one treatment group received prior training in interactional feedback strategies, the other group did not. The pre-test, immediate post-test, and delayed post-test were administered. The results of mixed between-within subjects ANOVA (SPANOVA) showed that engaging in interaction, regardless of any prior training, could significantly improve learners’ immediate mastery over the target form. However, in the long run, only the group trained in feedback strategies could maintain its superiority over the control group. The findings suggest that although engaging in peer interaction can be beneficial for young learners, sustained interlanguage development can result only if learners are trained in feedback strategies.

The learners’ identity is one of the most important key elements of learning to motivate learners to learn English. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between the male and female EFL learners’ motivation and their identity with a focus on gender. The study had a descriptive correlational design. The participants of this study were 50 Iranian male and 50 female postgraduate English majors, aged between 23 and 41, who were selected through convenient sampling. Three questionnaires of motivation, hardiness, and perfectionism were distributed among the participants. The results of Pearson correlation analyses demonstrated that there was not a significant relationship between EFL learners’ motivation and their hardiness in both genders. Also, the results showed no significant relationship between EFL learners’ motivation and their perfectionism in the two groups. Moreover, the results of independent-sample t-tests failed to find any significant difference between male and female students’ motivation and their hardiness and perfectionism.