درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

In countries where textbooks are considered as the main source of teaching/learning process, textbook evaluation seems to be inevitable and necessary. The current study aimed at evaluating the new English textbook entitled “Vision 1”, developed for the Iranian first grade high school students. To achieve this goal, two groups of participants took part in the study. They consisted of 30 teachers teaching this book in Baghmalek in Khuzestan province and 70 students studying in the first grade high school in the city mentioned. The quantitative data were collected through two questionnaires. The questionnaires were designed to evaluate the book in terms of seven criteria namely, practical considerations, layout and design, activities, skills, language type, subject and content and cultural considerations. The findings showed that teachers and students were interested in the book in all criteria except cultural considerations. The results also showed no significant difference between Iranian teachers' and students' perceptions towards the book. It can be concluded that the book needs to be modified to include some aspects of cultural values to open a window into learning about the target language culture.

Considering the benefits of preparation for writing in the pre-writing phase, this study attempted to examine the effects of different pre-task strategic planning activities (i.e., pre-task form-focus planning, content-focus planning, and no planning) on writing accuracy and motivation. To achieve the objectives of this study, sixty intermediate EFL learners were selected from an English language institute. They were randomly assigned into three groups, each of which included twenty participants. In order to measure the effect of strategic planning types, they were given a pretest and posttest in the form of narrative writing test and also the writing motivation questionnaire. One of the experimental groups received language focus activities, and the other one received content focus activities while the control group received no planning. After the twelve week intervention, all the groups were post tested. Results of the study based on ANCOVA showed that the form focus pre-task planning was the most effective in terms of its impact on the writing accuracy. However, it was found that there was no significant difference in the writing motivation of EFL learners who received different pre-task strategic planning activities. EFL teachers, curriculum developers and syllabus designers, and EFL learners can use the findings of this study in order to produce more accurate writings.  

From a Systemic Functional perspective, Grammatical Metaphor (GM) as is taken to be a chief driving force in the discourse of different genres, an important adult language machinery for ideational meanings to be semantically cross-mapped and realized through a different form in the stratum of the lexico-grammar, in order to convey changed meanings and tinker with the discursive flow and development of text in real time, mainly through nominalization of adjectives and verbs. Using a number of established works of the English novel as data, this study draws upon the author’s previous model for the categories of GM used in modern prose fiction, with the main focus placed on one of the six categories, Prepositional GM (PGM). PGM figures with a very high frequency in fiction and occurs when a GM is preceded by a preposition. This study finds that the language of prose fiction in English deploys some of these PGMsin either of two different meaning sof the adverbial, varying according to context. Again, as seen to be the hallmark of GM by many, GM is found to open up vast ideational meaning potentials in the semantics stratum, from which the lexico-grammar makes choices according to context and intended meaning. As argued elsewhere in the literature and here, and as backed up by the author’s own experience of the advanced teaching of writing and reading, broadened understanding of GM is a critically important component to writing instruction and its effectiveness, as seen in the large-scale horizons and agendas for effective teaching of English as a Foreign Language in Iran and beyond.

This study aimed to compare the effect of listening strategies, namely, metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective strategies, on impulsive and reflective visually impaired EFL learners’ (VILs) listening comprehension. The participants of the study were 58 male and female VILs at pre-intermediate level within the age range of 12-18 in the west of Iran, Khorram Abad. These participants were selected non-randomly from among 10 different classes available to the researcher. To select the participants, the researcher talked to learners of these 10 classes and sought the consent of 58 learners to take part in the study. The Preliminary English Test (PET) pre-piloted on 30 students with almost similar characteristics to the target sample was administered to 72 students for selecting a homogenized group of participants. Then, 58 students were selected. Afterwards, the researcher administered the Personality Questionnaire developed by Eysenck (1975) to categorize them into two experimental groups of impulsive and reflective. Furthermore, the researcher made sure that the two groups were homogeneous regarding their listening comprehension prior to the start of the treatment. In this study, both experimental groups practiced listening comprehension through listening strategies, namely, metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective strategies. The listening section of the PET test was administered as the posttest at the end of the treatment to both groups and their mean scores on the tests were compared through Independent Samples t-test. The results of statistical analyses led to the rejection of null hypothesis with the conclusion that the reflective learners significantly outperformed the impulsive students on the posttest of listening comprehension.

This study explored the relationship between EFL learners’ vocabulary size, lexical coverage of the text and reading comprehension texts (narrative & argumentative genres). To this end, 120 male and female out of 180 students studying at Talesh Azad University were selected based on their performance on the Nelson Proficiency Test. A Nelson reading proficiency test was also administered in order to check the homogeneity of the learners in their reading proficiency. After that, the researcher administered reading comprehension tests with narrative and argumentative genres in order to find the lexical coverage and vocabulary size for such reading tests. Learners' Vocabulary size was measured by the Levels Test, while their lexical coverage was measured by the newest version of Vocabulary Profile. In order to probe any significant relationship between the variables of the study, Pearson Correlationwas run. Results of the study showed that there was a strong relationship among vocabulary size, text coverage, and reading comprehension test at different genres.

Vocabulary is one of the essential components of language and learning phrasal verbs as part of vocabulary is quite challenging for foreign language learners. The present study aimed at investigating the effects of visual and auditory input enhancement on learning non-congruent phrasal verbs. The participants of the study were 90 intermediate English language learners who were divided into two experimental and one control groups. The first experimental group received visual input enhancement and the second experimental group auditory input enhancement, and the control group no enhanced material. All three groups were tested on their knowledge of non-congruent phrasal verbs before and after the treatment, using a non-congruent phrasal verb test developed by the researcher. The results of the data analyses indicated that both visual and auditory input enhancement were effective in learning non-congruent phrasal verbs by Iranian EFL learners, and that both groups outperformed the control group in their achievement. 

This study has aimed to compare the effects of two types of form-focused instruction, i.e. de-contextualized focus-on-forms instruction versus meaning-centered contextualized focus-on-form instruction, on the development of grammatical knowledge of Iranian high-school students. Two groups of male high-school first graders participated in this study.  One group was taught through de-contextualized deductive grammatical explanation, while the other group received enhanced input and contextualized grammar instruction embedded in meaning-centered activity based on dialogs. The results indicated that de-contextualized instruction as it is normally practiced in high-school contexts failed to promote successful use of the auxiliaries <em>do, does, </em>and<em> did</em> in a written production test. In contrast, adding the design features of meaning-based contextualization and enhanced input to instruction did result in better performance on a written production grammar test involving the use of the auxiliaries under study. In the delayed posttest, contextualized meaning-based instruction appeared to have a durable effect, but the effect was not significant enough to warrant any claim for the durable superiority of this form of instruction.