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This study aims to explore the attitudes and practices of Iraqi EFL teachers regarding formative assessment (FA). A total of 102 teachers from primary school to university filled in the Arabic version of Teachers' Conceptions and Practices of Formative Assessment Questionnaire. The questionnaire was translated from English into Arabic first and was validated using confirmatory factor analysis (Hazim Jawad, 2020). Findings showed that a 7-factor model had acceptable fit indices (GFI=0.90, CFI=0.91, RMSEA=0.05). Descriptive statistics were used to explain Iraqi EFL teachers’ attitudes and intentions regarding FA. Findings showed that the majority of Iraqi teachers believe that formative assessment is a useful procedure for measuring students’ learning and is helpful in their education. They also indicated that they have a positive attitude towards FA and are willing to use it. Correlational analysis showed that Affective Attitude, Instrumental Attitude, Subjective Norm, Controllability, and Self-Efficacy were strong predictors of intentions to use formative assessment. However, only Instrumental Attitude had a small significant correlation with the Behavior Scale. In other words, those teachers who believe that FA is useful in improving students learning tend to actually employ FA in their teaching. Findings also showed that female teachers have more positive attitudes towards FA and tend to use it more in their teaching. Implications of the findings for improving English language teaching are discussed.

مطالعات میان-رشته ای اخیرنشان داده است که امید نقش مهمی درپیشرفت تحصیلی وعملکرد شغلی دارد. با توجه به کمبود تحقیق درحوزه بینابینی امید وتدریس زبان دوم یا خارجی، برای اولین بار،این مقاله به ارائه مفهوم سازی طبقه ای امید برای تدریس زبان انگلیسی به عنوان زبان خارجی می پردازد. پس ازتهیه طرح تحقیق اکتشافی به روش ترکیبی، با استفاده ازتکنیکهای مشاهده وانجام مصاحبه عمیق، جمع آوری داده های کیفی بنیاد محورازمدرسان مجرب زبان انگلیسی تا هنگام حصول اشباع نظری داده ها ادامه یافت. 38شاخص مرتبط با هفت طبقه اصلی شناسایی گردید. برای قضاوت درباره اعتبار یافته های کیفی، پرسشنامه 38آیتمی امید طراحی گردید و سپس به صورت پایلوت اجرا شد. درمرحله بعد، به منظورآزمون نمودن تعمیم پذیری یافته های مرحله پایلوت ، پرسشنامه پالایش شده 35 آیتمی امید برنمونه کانونینس ازجمعیت ایران شامل 228مدرس زبان انگلیسی از استانهای تهران،چهارمحال- بختیاری، واصفهان اجرا شد. آنالیزهای آماری داده های مرحله آزمون، 35 شاخص مرتبط با هفت مؤلفه اصلی سازنده ساختار امید را تایید نمود. بنابراین،عوامل اصلی شامل ارتباط بین فردی، مقصد اجتماعی،هدف گذاری،احساس،یقین،منبع، وتلاش موردانتظارتأیید گردیدند. به علاوه ، طراحی ، ساخت، واعتبار سنجی مقیاس سنجش 35 آیتمی امید برای تدریس زبان انگلیسی به عنوان زبان خارجی در محیط ایران انجام شد. همچنین، قدرت توضیحی تمامی شاخص های دخیل در ایجاد امید برای تدریس زبان انگلیسی به عنوان زبان خارجی مورد آزمون قرار گرفتندوبرآوردشدند. یافته های این پژوهش، ساخت برنامه های مداخله گر آموزشی را روشن تر می سازد تا مدرسان زبان انگلیسی به سطوح بالاترامید برای تدریس زبان انگلیسی دست یابند.

Although Persian and English share many common phonemes, there are some phonological features that are present in English but absent in Persian which tend to lead to mispronunciation on the part of Persian learners of English, mostly through negative transfer. The present research assesses the efficacy of a communicative framework in improving Iranian adult EFL learners’ pronunciation of five English phonemes absent in the phonological system of Persian. Thirty EFL learners, divided into experimental and control groups, participated in the training course which lasted 22 sessions (330 minutes). The experimental group was instructed using the communicative framework for teaching pronunciation while the control group received traditional methods of pronunciation teaching. The pronunciation quality of these sounds were then assessed by four native and four non-native English teachers as well as by the PRAAT speech analysis software in the case of the vowels. Although no significant difference was detected between the experimental and control groups with regard to posttest results, a positive trend was observed in favor of the experimental group regarding specific features (e.g., formant frequencies, duration, center of gravity) of the problematic sounds.

This study examined the association between teacher educators’ personality traits and their interpersonal behavior at Farhangian University (Teacher Education University in Iran). A sample of 148 student teachers majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) at two branches of Iranian Teacher Education University evaluated their teacher educators’ interpersonal behavior by the questionnaire for teacher interaction (QTI). The teacher educators (N=17) also completed the QTI and the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI). The results of correlational analyses indicated significant associations between educators’ personality traits and their interpersonal behavior. More associations were observed between educators’ personality and student teachers’ perceptions of interpersonal behavior while fewer associations were observed between educators’ personality and the educators’ self-perceptions. Moreover, the results revealed that all educators’ personality traits except for Openness were significantly correlated with the two interpersonal behavior dimensions of Influence and Proximity. When stepwise regression analyses were done for the Influence dimension, the strongest model for prediction included Neuroticism and Conscientiousness while for the second dimension, Agreeableness emerged as the sole, significant predictor of educator Proximity.

The literature on foreign language reading instruction has witnessed a significant bulk of research reporting the effectiveness of strategy instruction in improving reading outcomes. However, few studies have investigated the effects of reading strategy instruction on reading affective variables among young English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of teaching second language (L2) reading strategies on young Iranian EFL learners’ reading self-efficacy and reading attitudes. To this end, a sample of 48 Iranian EFL learners, aged 11-13, was recruited through convenience sampling and randomly assigned to an experimental group (N = 25) and a control group (N = 23). Using a quasi-experimental design, the researchers employed an experimental group that received a 12-week reading strategy instruction and a control group that were taught with the regular method without any strategy instruction. The Reading Self-Efficacy Questionnaire (RSEQ) and Reading Attitude Questionnaire (RAQ) were administered to measure the reading self-efficacy and reading attitudes of the participants as pre-test and post-test of the study. The strategy instruction intervention for the present study was based on Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA). The findings of the study indicated that the learners in the experimental group significantly outperformed those of the control group in terms of L2 reading self-efficacy. However, it was revealed that there was no significant difference between the reading attitudes of the two groups at the end of the semester. Overall, it may be concluded that EFL practitioners can incorporate teaching of reading strategies into their classrooms in order to help learners to gain both confidence and competence to address reading tasks more effectively.

Miscommunication has been reported as a major contributing factor to aviation mishaps. About 70% of the first 28000 reports to NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System were related to communication problems (Sexton, 1999). According to Chaparro and Groff (2002), the most frequent human errors in aircraft maintenance, is supposed to be information misinterpretation. The movement area of an airport is typically the place where a single misunderstanding may have serious and adverse effect on flight safety. Furthermore, Eadie (2000) puts emphasis on conducting research on applied communication related to real phenomena in the real world. Therefore, the current study aims to investigate miscommunication among aviation personnel. To this end, first, a corpus of 31 authentic audio records and reports of aviation mishaps was analyzed based on Grice’s maxims. Consequently, the findings of the study revealed that teaching Grice’s (1975) Maxims needs to be taken into account in verbal communication. The findings of the research have implications for curriculum designers, pilots, and air traffic controllers.

This study examined the role of the native language (L1) transfer in a non-native language (L2) acquisition of the there-insertion construction at the syntax-semantics interface. Specifically, the study investigated if Mandarin EFL learners would make overgeneralization errors in the situation where an L1 argument structure constitutes a superset of its L2 counterpart. Verbs of existence and appearance (EAA) such as exist, appear are possible with the there-insertion construction in which the single argument remains in the underlying direct object position. In Mandarin, some verb classes also allow their single arguments to appear in the verb-subject (VS) order. For example, VEA and verbs of monadic change of state (COS) (die, escape) are compatible with the VS order. Some verbs of manner of motion (MOM) (run, swim) are also permissible with the construction. Seventy upper-intermediate and advanced L1 Mandarin EFL learners and 30 native English speakers participated in an acceptability judgement test, the results of which show that L1 Mandarin EFL learners acquired native-like knowledge of the there-insertion construction with verbs of EAA, but they have difficulties recognizing the unacceptability of the there-insertion sentences with verbs of COS and MOM. Individual results by subjects show that it is possible to recover from L1 transfer. Mandarin EFL learners start to unlearn the overgeneralization errors with MOM verbs by drawing on the semantic properties. The experimental results provide further evidence for the previous findings suggesting that the L2 argument structure acquisition is constrained by L1, and the recovery from L1 transfer is also possible.

Teacher professional development, as a burgeoning term, has attracted a surge of interest in English language teaching. In second language (L2) professional development, the common orthodoxy has been one which considers teachers as that of knowledge consumers. It is commonly argued that top-down approaches to teachers’ professional development has done little to maximize teachers’ professionalism. To unravel the above-mentioned dilemma, this study was an attempt to implement collaborative action research, as a viable means, to boost teachers’ professional development in a networked community of shared knowledge. To this end, thirteen male and female Iranian English teachers, within the age range of 22-35, were selected through convenience sampling. The selected participants were added to a group in WhatsApp. The online classes began with plenary debate, mostly in the form of workshops through problematizing a particular topic, which were directly linked to teachers’ actual teaching experience. Insights into the EFL teachers’ professional development were acquired through the triangulation of data from four main sources (i.e., teachers’ professional journals, reflective journals, action research projects, and semi-structured interviews). The findings revealed that engaging EFL teachers in a collaborative dialogue in a networked community of shared knowledge ultimately culminated in development of action research projects which resulted in sustained L2 professional development, whereby participating teachers developed a broader understanding of research and adopted reflective inquiry in their L2 teaching practices. The findings have important implications for language teachers in general, and EFL teachers, syllabus designers, and material developers, in particular.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been with us, for almost a year now. It has affected our lives in multiple ways and challenged our achievements as well. Daily life has changed in aspects we never would have imagined. We had to change our habits and behaviors quickly in order to assure the health of our family, our neighbors and the rest of the world. While facing this “unprecedented” situation, there are terms that appear to describe the health crisis and its consequences. This planetary pandemic has also changed human behavior. In this article, we will see how the word Covid-19, a real agent of change in our existence, initiated changes in language and our behavior. Indeed, within the generative process of meaning as envisioned by semiotics, Covid-19 is an actant that crosses the different stages of process, from denomination to discourse. The discursive effervescence of Covid-19 is narrative. It appears as the prototype of the anti-subject. Perfect and absolute embodiment of evil. A single narrative program motivates it: propagation. We also see that Covid-19 is no longer just the anti-subject of this story. It truly becomes the Anti-Sender, leading in the shadows an army of villains, capable of reinventing themselves at one’s leisure. This is a spectacular example of actantial cumulation.

Due to the significance of teachers’ beliefs and individual variables, a bulk of studies has focused on teacher characteristics over the past two decades. As an attempt to further clarify the interplay between teacher-related constructs in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context, the present study set out to explore the structural model hypothesizing the predictive role of teachers’ self-efficacy and collective teacher efficacy in affecting the psychological well-being of teachers in Iranian EFL context. In so doing, a sample of 179 English teachers was given the three self-report scales measuring the variables under investigation. As for the statistical analysis, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was employed to test the fit of the hypothesized model. The results indicated that teacher self-efficacy accounted for 19.8% of the variance while collective teacher efficacy amounted to 11.3% of the variance in psychological well-being. In addition, it was revealed that although both predictors had a unique effect on psychological well-being, teacher self-efficacy was a stronger predictor of psychological well-being than collective teacher efficacy. The results and implications are finally elaborated.