درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The intention of the present paper is to seek whether gender has any impact on the effectiveness of applying Guthke's Lerntest approach in reading comprehension. For this purpose, after selecting 60 intermediate EFL learners, they were arbitrarily categorized to four clusters of males and females, two experimental and two control groups, each consisting of 15 male and 15 female learners. Both control and experimental groups took part in a reading performance class, but just the main groups (experimental) were subjected to interventionist model of dynamic assessment (DA) on their reading tests, and control groups were assessed through static testing method. A pretest and a posttest were given to the intermediate level and, a questionnaire comprising 16 items was given to the experimental groups to elicit their attitudes towards the application of Guthke's Lerntest approach. To examine the hypotheses of the current research, independent t-test and Likert -scale were used. The results of the study revealed that EGM and EGF learners were not very much different with regard to their performances on the reading post-test. In addition, the learners held highly positive attitudes towards DA practices in their EFL setting.

Writing effective and persuasive manuscripts for submission to the high-indexed Iranian and international English-medium journals for the purpose of publication deserves having to-the-point knowledge and proficiency, which the Non-Native English writers of the non-English speaking countries seem to be lacking. Therefore, researchers need to identify problems and challenges that the group of writers encounter in the field of English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP). Therefore, this study aims to identify the ERPP needs of the Physical Education Ph.D. students and writers. Hence, interviews were conducted with a group of Physical Education content experts and Ph.D. students to identify the writers’ problems and challenges. The interviews were tape recorded as the participants had already been informed of the recordings and research aim. The tape recordings were then transcribed and analyzed in the thematic analysis and the grounded theory methods. The data analysis came up with four major themes (gained in the selective coding stage), 20 sub-themes (gained in the axial coding stage) and 83 themes (gained in the initial/open coding stage). The four major themes were `problem with language,’ `problem with content,’ `problem with journals,’ and `the demotivating factors.’ The fourth major theme, i.e., `the demotivating factors’, consisted of the sub-heading the technological illiteracy problem, which should be regarded as the novelty feature of this paper. The research is useful for material designers and instructors of the English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) and others to offer tailor-made education to the tertiary level Physical Education students.

Though many studies have been conducted on the effects of self-assessment on L2 learning over the last decade, none has investigated how self-assessment reports lead to improving L2 learning. Thus, this study aims to disclose how self-assessment reports improve Iranian high school students' writing skills and their perceptions of the effectiveness of self-assessment reports in cultivating writing skills. For this purpose, the researchers selected o ne intact grade 11 class (n = 21) at Shahed public high school in Borujerd, Iran. During the instruction lasting 15 sessions held twice a week, a self-assessment report was designed based on Nunan's (2004) template and given to the students to assess their writings weekly. Then, a focus group interview was run with six students. Findings documented a significant improvement in the students' writing skills in terms of content, language, organization, and task requirements. Additionally, the focus group interview results yielded four themes: raising students' awareness of evaluation criteria, making students more self-regulated, letting students have a voice in their academic destiny, and increasing students' motivation to write. In light of the findings, a number of conclusions are drawn, and several implications are put forward.

ELT coursebooks are the fertile soil for the transmission of cultural perspectives and also strong tools for shaping L2 learners' behaviors and expectations. This study investigated the existence of covert/ hidden curriculum in two of the widely used ELT coursebook series-- Top Notch and English File . To do so, the content of the series was analyzed via Moran's (2001) model of dimensions of culture and Chao’s (2011) main categories of culture . The results indicated that the series, along with covering different dimensions of culture, are biased mainly in favor of the western products, persons and perspectives, and that despite their global EFL/EIL audience, they vividly base their dialogues, reading and listening on the norms and values of the English-speaking countries, with almost no attention to the local, especially Asian values. The study, discussing the implications of such culture- related covert curricula in the ELT coursebooks, makes relevant suggestions for the design of ELT coursebooks in the present global village.

This study aimed to determine the university students’ level of social presence, preferred synchronous learning tool, and learning performance and their differences according to sex, age, year, major, Blackboard experience, and perceived computer literacy. The relationship between students’ social presence, preferred synchronous tool, and learning performance was also determined. The respondents were 29 students enrolled in the ESL online elective class, Global Business Communication, at a university in South Korea. There were two sets of online surveys used in this study. The statistical tools used in this study were the mean, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test, Mann-Whitney Test, and Kruskal-Wallis Test. The results showed that the students maintained a Moderately High level of social presence throughout the duration of the course, chose KakaoTalk as their preferred synchronous learning tool, and concluded the course with an overall average grade, or learning performance level of “B”. There was a significant difference regarding the students’ learning performance when they were classified according to Blackboard experience; and no significant relationship existed between the students’ social presence, preferred synchronous tool, and learning performance.

Recent research has shown that academic writing is not ‘author-evacuated’ but, rather, carries a representation of the writers’ identity. One way through which writers project their identity in academic writing is stance-taking toward propositions advanced in the text. Appropriate stance-taking has proved to be challenging for novice writers of Research Articles (RAs), especially those writing in a foreign language. To contribute to the literature on stance-taking, the present study compared the move-based use of evaluative resources in the introduction section of L1 (written by native English speakers) and L2 (written by Iranian, non-native writers) English RAs in the discipline of Applied Linguistics. To this end, 100 English Research Article Introductions (RAIs), 50 by L1 writers and 50 by L2 writers, were investigated as the corpus of the study. Categories of analysis were taken from Appraisal framework (Martine & White, 2005) and CARS model (Swales, 2004). The results revealed that the two groups of texts were not substantially different in the overall use of appraisal resources in the whole body of RAIs. However, more detailed analyses of the specific categories of appraisal in each of the rhetorical moves demonstrated that in some cases, especially in moves 1 and 3, L1 and L2 writers made different choices when taking a stance. The findings of this study can serve as a valuable source providing a practical and comprehensive understanding of the use of evaluative resources in RAIs for EAP researchers, teachers, and other professionals involved in the teaching of academic writing.

In order to establish the why of noticing, it is imperative to empirically explore the factors that potentially mediate noticing. This study aimed to explore two factors that are believed to affect noticing: the complexity of target structures and learners’ second language (L2) proficiency level. English relative clauses (RCs) were selected as the target structures, and Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis (AHH) was taken as the measure of the complexity of the RCs. A sample of 113 freshmen English language majors were selected as the participants of the study. A test of English RCs was developed as the placement test, and Key English Test (KET) was used to classify the participants into three groups of High (N=38), Mid (N=37), and Low (N=38) L2 proficiency level. Note-taking was used as the measure of noticing. After administering the RC test and the proficiency test, the participants were given a number of authentic reading texts containing instances of RCs and were required to take notes during reading activity. The non-parametric Friedman’s test demonstrated that the complexity of RCs positively affected the participants’ noticing while the non-parametric ANCOVA indicated that the participants’ L2 proficiency level had no significant effect on noticing. The findings of this study can be helpful to both teachers and material developers in providing learners with optimal conditions for noticing linguistic forms, which in turn, could facilitate L2 learning.

The present study aimed at investigating the relationship between interpersonal intelligence of Iranian bilingual and multilingual EFL learners and their reading comprehension achievement. To do so, 60 intermediate EFL students were selected from a group of 80 based on their OPT scores. They were non-randomly divided into two experimental groups. Data collection took place during the summer semester 2017. Once the interpersonal intelligence questionnaire and the reading comprehension test scores had successfully been collected, the results of Pearson product correlation coefficient analyses showed that there was a significant relationship between Iranian bilingual and multilingual EFL learners’ interpersonal intelligence and their reading comprehension achievement: higher interpersonal intelligence was associated with higher levels of reading comprehension achievement and higher statistical significance among bilingual learners. Therefore, it was suggested that Multiple Intelligence Theories could still serve as determining factors in planning programs to teach reading in spite of the theoretical, conceptual, and empirical criticisms of the idea.

Translation can have long-term effects on all languages and cultures. It is not a mere linguistic act, but mostly a cultural act, since language is by nature one of the major carriers of cultural elements. Thus, the translator’s job is not just transferring the meaning of words and sentences from the source text to the target text. Culture-specific items often cause translation problems. Identifying such items in the source text and locate their rendering in the target text has been the focus of the present study. This study has attempted to spot culture-specific elements in the source text; i.e. Matilda, and to check the extent of the translator’s fidelity in rendering such elements and dealing with the concept of domain of discourse in Lefever’s (1992) words. To conduct the study, the researchers have applied a qualitative-descriptive (as well as a quantitative) method, focusing on the analysis of the text and classifying the cultural elements in the source text on the basis of Newmark’s (1988) taxonomy. The findings thereof revealed that universe/domain of discourse has changed in several cases, mostly when the translator has used domestication strategy.

Individual characteristics and differences, namely strategy-use behavior have been gaining much attention among researchers due to influences that they may have on test takers’ performance on reading tests. From a language testing perspective, however, further experimental studies are needed in this regard. This study investigated the relationship between test-takers’ strategy-use behavior and their reading test performance. Five hundred and twenty Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners (both male and female) participated in this study. They were assigned to high- and the low-reading ability groups based on their scores on a teacher-made reading comprehension test. They were also required to sit for a teacher-made TOEFL-based reading comprehension test and answer the adapted version of Phakiti’s (2008) Cognitive and Metacognitive Strategy Questionnaire with 30 items immediately after the test. The reliability of both instruments was approved through Cronbach alpha and the validity was assured through content and construct evidences of validity. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) on the questionnaire indicated that three factors were identified as cognitive (comprehension, retrieval, memory) and three as metacognitive strategies (planning, monitoring, evaluation) for both ability groups. Moreover, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis showed that metacognitive strategies had a regulating function on cognitive strategies in both groups. Furthermore, the results showed that in the high ability group Comprehension (COM) and Memory (MEM) strategies and in the low-ability group, Retrieval (RET) strategies were the best predictors of reading test performance. Finally, some implications and suggestions for further research are presented.

Practicum as a component of the English language teacher education program has been welcomed by pre-service teacher education institutes. Despite the great emphasis laid on practicum by Farhangian University, it has not been evaluated comprehensively by the student teachers and graduated student teachers up to now.  The main objective of the study was to explore the benefits and problems of the practicum program. To do so, a qualitative case study was employed. 25 informants were recruited using a purposive sampling procedure. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with student teachers and graduated student teachers. The interpretational and reflective analysis techniques were employed to analyze the data. The findings were content analyzed in terms of benefits/advantages and challenges of the practicum. They indicate that practicum courses make the student teachers ready for real teaching, help them learn about the realities of real teaching and overcome the negative attitudes and feelings about the teaching profession. It has been also found that the practicum program needs revision in terms of evaluation, quality of placement schools, and cooperation between mentors, university educators and student teachers. Findings can be used by teacher training institutes, practicum educators, school mentors, and EFL student teachers.

This study is aimed at (1) examining the preferred English learning styles among secondary school students; (2) exploring the mismatches in teachers’ English teaching styles and students’ learning style preferences. A quantitative approach was used to seek answers to the research questions. The sample of this research involved 204 students and 5 teachers of English from 5 different secondary schools in Vientiane Capital, Lao PDR. All student and teacher participants were invited to rate their agreement levels on a five-point rating scale, towards Reid’s (1995) six learning style preferences. The data collected were analyzed based on descriptive statistics. The findings reveal that student participants had more than one preferred learning styles. They preferred Kinesthetic, Group, and Audio learning styles in their English classes. For them, learning through doing, learning and working together with classmates, doing or resolving challenging tasks as well as listening to teachers and someone’s instructions through interaction made them learn more effectively. The study also finds that mismatches in styles between teachers’ teaching styles and students’ learning style preferences do exist in four out of the five sampled schools. Teachers are more oriented to Visual styles. For instance, they favor writing things on board, asking students to read from textbooks, provide activities that make students read rather than listen to instructions, while students are likely not to prefer the Visual learning style.