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Classroom discourse refers to the language and interaction used by the teacher and the students to communicate and shape learning in the educational context. The present study focused on Iranian EFL teachers’ classroom discourse by observing their dominancy, teacher talk, question types, and interactions in their classes. To do so, through a non-experimental, descriptive research design, 20 female experienced teachers with the age range of 30-40, teaching at an upper-intermediate level in different language institutes in Isfahan, Iran were selected based on the convenience sampling. Two classes of the teachers were observed, the sessions were recorded, and their classroom discourses were transcribed and later analyzed. Moreover, to increase the validity and reliability of the research, a semi-structured interview was conducted with volunteer participants; their reflections on their communication with the learners and discourse types were collected and analyzed using descriptive statistics in terms of frequency and percentages. The findings of the study showed that the teachers made use of specific discourse to ascertain their dominance and control in their classes. The findings also revealed that the teachers used more monologic discourse patterns in their classes rather than dialogic ones. Teacher talk far exceeded student talk, Initiation-Response-Feedback pattern dominated the classroom discourse; and display questions were used more frequently than referential ones. These findings could benefit teachers to be more conscious about type of CD and its effect on student-to-student and teacher-to-student interactions. It could also serve the purpose of critical classroom discourse analysis

Despite a fairly long emergence of critical approaches to language teaching, there still seems to be a dearth of practitioner inquiries narrating experiences of implementing Critical Language Awareness (CLA) in English as Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. Prompted, the present study narrates the measures taken by an Iranian language teacher for encouraging learners to analyze and examine language deployment in the world around them. The participants of this semester-long study were a community of twenty young female students studying English Literature at a state university in Tehran, Iran who were engaged in a series of reading events including reflective reading of advertisements and TV commercials, and critical analysis of literary works, news and journalistic writings, inter alia. The analysis of classroom records plus reflective journals written by the students display the ways through which the students practiced standing back from texts, questioning the biased ideas, developing reasoned position, and responding in their own voices.

در این مقاله، مسئله تدوین کتاب درسی برای دوره مقدماتی آموزش زبان روسی در ایران بررسی می شود. نویسندگان سعی دارند نیازهای آموزشی نوین را که به هنگام انتخاب محتوای درسی برای این دوره حائز اهمیت هستند، تجزیه و تحلیل کنند و در این راستا به اصول فراگیری زبان روسی توسط ایرانیان تکیه می نمایند. بر اساس نتایج به دست آمده در نظر گرفتن ویژگی های ملی و حتی آداب و سنت ها در روند آموزش مقدماتی زبان خارجی تأثیر مثبت خواهد داشت و به ارتقای اثربخشی آموزش کمک خواهد کرد. در این مقاله همچنین برخی اصول انتخاب مواد درسی در آموزشِ مؤثرِ خط و املا و نیز روش استفاده از برنامه های کامپیوتری در آموزش زبان روسی به دانشجویان ایرانی مورد بررسی قرار می گیرد.

This study describes the sequential pattern of “through-produced” multiple questions using Conversation Analysis that sets the agenda dimension of questions, and the academic conditions that advance its use during turns at talk from five faculty meetings. Results show that a. No first-pair of the “through-produced” questions has been answered; b. the answers to the second-pair questions are achieved through paraphrases, clarifications, keyword repetitions, and circuitous rephrasing until the hearer conforms with the agenda set; c. The subordinates frame their default identities with lower epistemic knowledge, and d. “Through-produced” multiple questions can be a manifestation of Chair’s power. Implications and recommendations for cross-linguistic comparisons are offered to generalize the findings beyond the specific domain of the meeting.

EFL teachers’ professional identity is a multi-dimensional and complicated concept. It is influenced by many other issues in the educational context such as reflective practice. This study intended to explore the relationship between professional identity and reflectivity of Iranian EFL teachers. It also aimed to examine how high and low reflective teachers perceive the professional identity components. The participants were 89 EFL teachers teaching at three universities in Shiraz, Iran. Their selection was based on convenience sampling. The participants were asked to fill out two questionnaires including teacher professional identity questionnaire (Liou, 2008) and teacher reflectivity questionnaire (Akbari et al., 2010). Pearson product correlation coefficient revealed that there was a positive relationship between EFL teachers’ professional identity and reflectivity. Furthermore, the findings of regression analysis indicated that reflectivity could predict EFL teachers’ professional identity. Furthermore, the participants were categorized into two high and low reflective groups. Two groups were interviewed to examine the professional identity perceptions used by high and low reflective teachers. The thematic analysis showed that high reflective teachers used and implemented much more professional identity components in their teaching practice in comparison to the low reflective teachers.

Textbook evaluation serves as a useful tool at teachers‘ disposal to cope with uncertainty in opting for the proper material prior to embarking on their teaching career. This study aims at comparing two different ESP textbooks, one of them English for students of Mechanical Engineering, design of solids (SAMT publication), and the other one English in Mechanical Engineering (Oxford University Press). For the purpose of comparison and contrast, Textbook Evaluation Checklist (Miekley, 2005) was used against which the components of these two books were weighed to show what they have in common and where the point of departure from any commonality is. Although based on evaluative questions some inherent inefficiencies of these textbooks were revealed, it was generally concluded that both of them have tenable justification to be taught as an ESP course book.

The present research aims to examine the effects of using culturally oriented texts in project-based classes on the views of EFL university students regarding their L1 culture. To this end, three experimental groups of intermediate EFL freshmen, assigned to classes A, B and C, participated in this study. Each of the classes were presented with reading passages focused on L1 culture, L2 culture, and a combination of both L1 and L2 culture, respectively. A written two-question structured interview was designed by the researchers to gain in depth detailed information about the studentschr('39') views regarding L1 culture in each class. The interviews were then examined using content analysis. Findings revealed the effectiveness of the combined approach (i.e. the use of reading materials focused on L1 and L2 culture) in establishing more positive views about L1 culture in students. The results can provide insightful recommendations and implications for EFL instructors, educational materials developers and educational policy makers.

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has recently been the focus of numerous studies in language education since it aims to overcome the pitfalls of form-focused and meaning-focused instruction by systematically integrating content and language. This meta-analysis aims to synthesize the findings of 22 primary studies that tested the effect of CLIL on language skills and components. Guiding the analysis are three questions: What is the overall combined effect of CLIL on language skills and components? How do moderators condition the effect of CLIL? To what extent the overall combined effect is conditioned by publication bias? The overall effect size was found to be g=0.81, which represents a medium effect size with respect to Plonsky and Oswald’s (2014) scale. The results of moderator analysis show that CLIL has the highest effect on students’ grammar and listening proficiency and in lower levels of education, especially in elementary schools. It also has the highest effect when combined with hotel management as the subject matter. Fail-safe N test of publication bias shows that the significant positive outcome of CLIL cannot be accounted for by publication bias. The findings have clear implications for practitioners, researchers and curriculum developers.

Procrastination pervades the long and taxing process of foreign language learning and working against it is crucial. This study attempted to elicit and investigate the strategies and solutions from English teachers and learners which can help in dealing with procrastination over weekly assignments, term projects, and preparing for exams. To achieve this aim, suggestions were sought from 46 English teachers who had at least three years of teaching experience. Out of a total of 384 suggestions, higher-frequency ones were listed and solutions and strategies in related literature were sifted through to draw up a 21-item Likert-type questionnaire, which sought the reaction of English learners to the teacher-suggested strategies. A revised version was distributed among 97 English learners comprising 65 females and 32 males, whose ages ranged from 17 to 29 years. The English language teachers believed that to help students abandon their procrastination, they should encourage them with extra points for duly completed assignments, check the progress of projects, and give quizzes and exams during the term atop of other strategies. The most frequently endorsed strategies by the English learners included: adjusting the quantity of assignments to learner’s ability, selecting attractive and diverse assignments, teacher’s proper guidance and providing sample projects to reduce anxiety; and identifying the most important topics and disregarding unnecessary contents.

The primary aim of this study was to shed light on the impact of a new instruction model, reflective reciprocal teaching (RRT), on English as a foreign language learners' (EFL) reading comprehension ability. Its mode of inquiry was a mixed-method, and it took on a quasi-experimental design, including a pretest, treatment, and posttest paradigm. The sampling techniques were both convenience and random sampling by which 100 EFL freshman learners were selected and assigned into three groups of reflective reciprocal teaching (RRT), reciprocal teaching (RT), and control. Two tests, namely Oxford Quick Placement Test and Michigan English Language Assessment Battery, were used to measure EFL learners' proficiency level and reading comprehension ability in its quantitative phase. ANOVA was utilized to analyze the collected data. Also, during the next step, which aimed to explore the learners' perceptions of RRT instruction, semi-structured interviews were used to collect qualitative data. The results indicated that the RRT group outperformed the control group regarding their reading comprehension ability; however, the RT instruction did not significantly impact this issue. Accordingly, the qualitative data analysis findings indicated that self-regulated learning, perceived competence, metacognitive awareness, confidence, and intrinsic motivation were the significant results of the RRT instruction model, contributing to the learners' reading comprehension ability.

The present study intended to evaluate EFL students' performance on a traditional method of writing assessment in comparison to an alternative assessment technique by taking into account the effects of teacher and peer feedback. Moreover, the attitudes of the participants regarding assessment procedures and activities were focused in this study. To this end, thirty male and female language learners taking Advanced Writing course at university level were chosen as the participants of the study. First, all the participants were given a traditional writing test. Then, they were provided with a video and a reading passage related to the writing topic. Additionally, they received teacher and peer comments and feedback on their essays. As a further step, a questionnaire was distributed to collect information about the participants’ opinions on the provided treatments. Analysis of the results indicated that in general most EFL learners had a better performance in alternative assessment mainly on the components of content, organization and style in comparison to traditional one. Also, the participants showed a positive attitude in general about alternative assessment through teacher and peer feedback, chiefly towards teacher comments.  

This research aims to investigate the contributions of KARDS (knowing, analyzing, recognizing, doing, and seeing) to Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) institute teachers’ professional identity reconstruction. The researchers employed purposive sampling to choose twenty teachers. A KARDS questionnaire (Hassani, Khatib, & Yazdani Moghaddam, 2019a, 2019b) was used to classify the teachers into a more KARDS-oriented group (n=10) and a less-KARDS oriented group (N=10) on the basis of their scores on the questionnaire through quartile-based visual binning technique. Pre-course interview, post-course interview, teacher educator and teachers’ reflective journals, and class discussions were employed to gather data. After the pre-course interview, there was an implementation phase during which all twenty teachers became familiar with KARDS. Then, Grounded Theory was applied to analyze the data. Findings showed that there were four big shifts from “uncertainty of practice to certainty of practice”, “the use of fewer macro-strategies to the use of more macro-strategies”, “linguistic and technical view of language teaching to critical, educational, and transformative view of language teaching”, and “conformity to nonconformity to dominant ideologies” in teachers’ professional identities in both groups. The changes were analogous and/or identical in nature but not in quantity, and they should be underscored and incorporated in teacher education programs.

This meta-analysis study aimed to explore the effectiveness of Strategy-Based Teaching (SBT) in ELT (English Language Teaching). A total of 18 original studies (2000–2020), with 1834 participants of diverse learning and teaching contexts, conformed with the inclusion/ exclusion criteria, were employed to be analyzed in this study. To provide a comprehensive picture of the possible moderating factors, we included 21 moderators under three moderating sets. The impact of methodological criteria, such as eligibility revisions and substitution of alternative ranges of values for arbitrary or unclear decisions, was examined using sensitivity analyses. The findings revealed an overall significant, positive and medium effect of SBT on English learners’ outcomes for both fixed (g = 0.65) and random (g = 62) models. Moreover, meta-regression analysis results of moderating factors showed that the place, type, and design of the study had no significant predicting effect on SBT. It has been documented that the results of moderator analysis of language skills and components were also not significant. However, the results for moderating effect of language measurement instruments were found to be significant. Studies that employed standardized tests for language learning measurement revealed significantly higher mean effect size in comparison with those that used teachers’ assessments. Overall, SBT was found to be positively effective within a variety of teaching and learning contexts in ELT.