درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Although the importance of intercultural competence (IC) training has been increasingly recognized in recent scholarly reviews, home-based approaches invite further investigation in this paradigm. This study aims to make a contribution by exposing a domestic context to assess IC development through using qualitative and quantitative methods. To do so, sixty two undergraduate EFL student-teachers were guided to conduct two either on-line or face to face reflective ethnographic interviews over a sixteen-week course of cross-cultural communication. The quantitative findings obtained from the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) questionnaire showed significant increase in participants’ Perceived Orientation (PO) and Developmental Orientation (DO) after the course. Qualitative findings also revealed significant growth, provoking some new perceptions, and emphasizing the student-teachers’ positive responses to both IDI assessment and the intercultural interactions. The exploratory analysis of the participants’ reports on the ethnographic interviews resulted in seven emerged themes which conceptually matched the traditional IC model. Therefore, the study shows that using reflective ethnographic interviews in a mixed methods design is helpful in developing and assessing student-teachers’ IC.

In recent years, the importance of thinking skills in education has attracted the attention of researchers. To this end, this study investigated the effect of scaffolding and implicit instructions on the critical thinking skills (i.e., inference, evaluation, analysis, inductive and deductive reasoning) of EFL learners. To this end, 20 EFL learners who were taking an IELTS course at a language institute in two intact classes were chosen as the participants. One group was randomly assigned as the experimental group and their critical thinking skills were scaffolded following Vygotsky’s developmental model of the Zone of Proximal Development, and the other group was assigned as the control group and received implicit instruction for promoting critical thinking skills. California Critical Thinking Skills Test Form B developed by Facione and Facione (1993) was used to check the participants’ critical thinking skills. The results of the paired-samples t-test displayed that scaffolding and implicit instructions enhanced the EFL learners’ critical thinking. The analyses of the independent-samples t-test showed that the experimental group promoted their critical thinking to a greater extent in comparison with the control group. The findings of one-way MANCOVA indicated that by controlling for the pre-tests, scaffolding instruction was more effective than implicit instruction in developing the EFL learners’ critical thinking skills.

Much of what educators address is the overt curriculum; however, there is a hidden curriculum that affects education in a very profound manner. In view of that, the purpose of the present study is to determine the relationship of EFL teachers’ perspectives on hidden curriculum components in the Iranian institutional context with their students’ self-efficacy and national identity. More specifically, the present study surveyed the probable existence of any significant correlation between EFL teachers’ perspectives on the EFL hidden curriculum components, their students’ attitudes towards their own national identity, and self-efficacy. For this purpose, a model was suggested and tested using partial least squares variance-based structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), to examine EFL teachers’ perspectives on the EFL hidden curriculum components contributing to their students’ national identity and self-efficacy. A total of 164 institutional EFL teachers in Iran completed the EFL hidden curriculum questionnaire. Besides, 987 students (about eighty percent of their learners) were asked to fill in national identity and self-efficacy questionnaires. Based on this model, all the correlations between the latent variables were significant except for three latent variables including the relationships among EFL teachers’ perspectives on the EFL hidden curriculum components (social atmosphere, organizational structure, and interaction between teachers and learners) and their learners’ self-efficacy. In addition, the results depicted all the relationships between latent variables was positive relations; while, the relationship between EFL learners’ national identity and self-efficacy was proved to be negative.

Classroom management constraints and how English teachers cope with or remove them effectively have significantly impacted both EFL teachers and teacher educators. However, the coping strategies employed by teachers with high and low levels of expertise have not been thoroughly explored yet. To this end, first 22 teachers in one language institute in Tehran were interviewed and their main coping strategies were extracted through qualitative analysis of the interviews. Then, the extracted strategies were worded into items carefully. The questionnaire of EFL teachers’ coping strategies was validated for the purpose of the study. The findings revealed that the participants used twenty-three coping strategies under two sub-constructs: problem-focused and emotion-focused strategies, based on exploratory factor analysis. One hundred EFL teachers with high and low levels of expertise (fifty in the high and fifty in the low group) responded to the items in the coping strategy questionnaire. The results revealed that highly expert teachers used the extracted coping strategies more frequently. Furthermore, the researchers confirmed that teachers need in-service training courses on coping strategies to manage their classes effectively. The results have some implications for stakeholders, namely English language teachers, teacher educators, language institutes, education departments, and EFL curriculum developers.

This study aimed to investigate the grammatical complexity based on Biber, Gray, Staples, and Egbert’s (2020) linguistic description in research articles published in Iranian local journals and international journals. The corpus of the study included 40 Applied Linguistics research articles, 20 published in Iranian local journals and 20 in international journals in 2019-2020. The research articles were selected through purposive sampling from two Iranian journals, namely Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics and Journal of Teaching Language Skills, and two international journals, including Journal of English for Specific Purposes and System Journal. The research articles were analyzed in terms of three dimensions of grammatical complexity, including the structural types, syntactic functions, and specific structural/syntactic features. Moreover, for intra-rater consistency, the researcher re-analyzed the corpus after one month to see whether the same results were found. According to the results, in terms of the first dimension, i.e., the structural types, the frequencies of structures indicating higher grammatical complexity (non-finite dependent clauses and dependent phrases) outnumbered the frequency of structures showing lower grammatical complexity (finite dependent clauses) in both local and international journals. Concerning the second dimension, i.e., syntactic function within the structural type, the frequencies of more complex syntactic functions were higher than those of simple functions in both sets of research articles. Concerning the third dimension, i.e., specific structural/syntactic features, both groups of writers preferred to use more complex specific structural/syntactic features than simple ones.

English pronunciation is one of the most important and complicated parts of foreign language teaching and learning. Due to its complexity, pronunciation has been overlooked in English language teaching. Understandable pronunciation is an important part of communicative competence. Individuals who have acceptable pronunciation can easily improve their language skills better than those who have weak pronunciation. Thus, English pronunciation is very significant for successful communication. This study investigated the factors influenced Iranian EFL learners’ English pronunciation learning. To this end, fifty Iranian EFL learners participated voluntarily in this study. A quantitative method was used as the design of this study. The researchers used a survey questionnaire as the instrument of this study. The collected data were analyzed via using frequency and percentage. The findings of this research indicated that factors such as pronunciation instruction, attitude, motivation, and error correction respectively were the most important factors that had the greatest effects on Iranian learners’ pronunciation improvement. It was also concluded that when teaching pronunciation into their classes, EFL teachers and learners should be equipped with these factors that can considerably increase their success in the correct teaching and learning of English pronunciation.