درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Extracting incompatible values in the best-sellers current in ELT markets is a real concern. In this study, the researchers tried to bring some claims/counterclaims for hidden ideologies regarding two imported English language teaching coursebooks-Four Corners and Impact Values Series, which are commonly taught within Iranian English language institutes. The main intention was that they might transmit incompatible English culture to the Iranian learners. Through a qualitative design, vigorous content analysis was conducted over diverse randomly selected texts/topics and images in the two books, it was found out that regarding images, four themes instantiated incongruent values to the local context for Iranian learners including A) boy-girl relationship, B) imbalance of religious norms as opposed to other religions, C) incongruent lifestyles, and D) the proportion of the male vs. female images in the two books. As to topics included in the books, mismatching items were detected within seven main categories including A) Cross-gender relationship, B) disregarding the importance of family, C) excessive Use of Internet, D) Mobile Phones, and Computers, E) food and drink prohibitions, F0 forbidden or inappropriate habits,G) incompatible jobs and professions, and H) showing disrespect for older people. Finally, some suggestions regarding compatibility issues with local cultural input enrichment with the Iranian culture were given.

This study set out to check the addressing behavior within men’s and women’s talk in the written conversations in English language textbook series titled ‘New Interchange book’ by Richards, Hull and Proctor, (1998) from Cambridge University Press. In line with this aim, the present researchers initially prepared descriptive tables for both formal and informal contexts in three theme categories (Social, Cultural & Economic) vis a vis four case appropriations (men*men, men*women, women*men, women*women). The distributions of interlocutors were coded through content analysis techniques. The major findings indicated that the highest percentage of detected address terms belonged to pronouns (67.7%). The proportions for gender appropriations between interlocutors for this address term showed that the case condition with women to men (52.3%) and men to women (36.4%) had the highest rates as compared with other cases. Then, in the final stage, the datasets were scrutinized in terms of theories on gender disparity in the instructional materials. This paper has some pedagogical implications in terms of addressing term inequality as mapped on gender status within ELT books, which might indirectly change the balance against full and rich contexts for effective learning to occur.

Although Task-Based Instruction (TBI) has received large attention on the part of English practitioners throughout the world, it seems that there is yet a huge gap between the Iranian EFL teachers’ perceptions and practices in implementing it in real classes. Hence, this study set out to unearth the possible sources of difficulties in using TBI in EFL classes. To meet the goals, a total of 120 male and female EFL teachers were selected through stratified random sampling from Iran language institute (ILI) branches in Tehran, Iran. After critically reviewing the literature and using a flow chart technique, a questionnaire including 20 items was developed, piloted, and distributed among the participants. Then, the collected data were analyzed through the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Results indicated that three main factors, namely lack of appropriate assessment methods , cultural difference , and efficacy of the method received the utmost significance from the EFL teachers’ perspectives that have led to not using TBI. In the end, the implications of the findings were discussed for different stakeholders.

The current research examined the use of lexical bundles in the result sections of research papers by Iranian non-native writers in the field of applied linguistics. The WordSmith Software was applied to identify lexical bundles. In addition, the two analytical frameworks Biber et al. (2004) and Ruiying and Allison (2003) were used to categorize the bundles with regard to their structural features and their moves and steps. Moreover, with the aid of concordance, the identified clusters were analyzed and categorized according to their communicative functions. The results of the current research showed that Iranian writers relied heavily on the use of specific formulaic bundles to perform the communicative functions associated with the moves and steps. The findings also revealed that four moves out of six moves were mostly used by Iranian authors. Moreover, the researchers found that the extensive range of formulaic clusters used to demonstrate Move 2, Reporting results, the least bundles occurred in Move 4, Summarizing results, and also no clusters were used in Move 5, Evaluating the study along with Move 6, Deductions from the research by Iranian writers. The findings of this study boost the awareness of formulaic sequences usage for novice writers in particular discourse and communicative function.

Despite the abundance of research investigating general and academic vocabularies and developing dozens of word lists, few studies have compared academic vocabulary with general service word lists such as conversation vocabulary. Many EAP researchers assume that university students need to know all the words in West’s (1953) General Service List (GSL) as a prerequisite to academic words (e.g., Coxhead’s, 2000) and teachers at language institutes recommend conversation students to learn words in Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL) as a follow-up to the GSL. The present study compared the academic and conversation vocabularies by exploring frequency and coverage of words in academic and conversation corpora. The GSL and AWL words were investigated in a conversation corpus and an academic corpus, each containing around 12 million running words. The analysis revealed that 1200 GSL word families were highly frequent in both corpora and 645 GSL word families were highly frequent in the conversation corpus but of low frequency in the academic texts. Also, a new academic word list of 700 word families was developed, which proved to be much more rigorous than Coxhead’s AWL. Further analysis indicated that the abovementioned 645 GSL words had a very low coverage of academic texts (0.7%), while they covered 4.05% of the conversation corpus. The new academic word list covered only 1.6% of the conversation corpus, whereas it had a high coverage of the academic texts (9.1%), much higher than that of the AWL (7.5%). The analysis of some other academic corpora revealed identical results.

As a negative consequence of COVID 19, almost all students felt obliged to leave the universities and use electronic devices to learn. Some universities encouraged faculty members to use Electronic teaching as an alternative to traditional classrooms. Despite a large number of studies on different forms of electronic learning, the effectiveness of synchronous and asynchronous E-learning in teaching grammar to EFL learners has been neither investigated nor compared appropriately. Two intact  classes of undergraduate students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) from Farhangiyan university were selected. and each received the treatment through either synchronous or asynchronous E-learning activities. The same syllabus consisting of dependent Clauses, Appostive, infinitives, and gerunds were taught to the two groups. EFL learners’ knowledge of grammar was  measured by recognition and production tests.  The two groups’ scores were submitted to repeated measures ANOVA tests. The findings showed that both modes of E-learning greatly influenced the language learners’ knowledge of grammar as measured by recognition and production tests. Results also showed that the interaction between electronic modes and grammar recognition and production tests was statistically significant. Therefore, it could be concluded that E-learning learning is useful, synchronous learning is more effective for improving the language learners’ production, and asynchronous learning is effective for improving the skills and subskills which require reflection and comprehension.  

To explore the effectiveness of flipped instruction in influencing second language learning outcomes, the current research investigated the contribution of flipped classrooms of an English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) writing course to Iranian learners’ writing development and writing motivation. In so doing, two intact classes were chosen as the participants (N=43) of this research and they were randomly assigned to a Control Group (N = 18) and an Experimental Group (N = 25). During one semester, the Control Group underwent the traditional writing instruction, while the Experimental Group received a flipped writing instruction. Second Language Writing Motivation Scale (SLWMS) and two timed writing tasks were given to gather the required data. The results demonstrated that the flipped method of teaching was substantially effective in improving the L2 writing performance of the experimental group ( F = 22.20, p = 0.000, partial eta squared = 0.35) . Also, the results indicated that the flipped instruction had a statistically significant effect on learners’ writing motivation ( F = 51.67, p = 0.000, partial eta squared = 0.56) . The findings have remarkable implications for L2 writing methodology.