درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Due to the potent role of critical thinking in learners’ academic success and its connection with factors conducive to learning such as argumentation ability, the present study seeks to primarily probe the correlation between Iranian EFL learners’ critical thinking ability and their argumentative writing achievement, and investigate the predictability of the students’ argumentative writing achievement based on their scores on critical thinking scale. Furthermore, the effect of gender on Iranian EFL learners’ argumentative writing achievement was investigated. In so doing, 'Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal' (2002) as well as an argumentative writing assignment was employed, and the participants of the study included 178 EFL learners in three universities in Mashhad, Iran. Structure Equation Modeling (SEM) was utilized to analyze the data. The results substantiated the positive correlation between critical thinking ability and argumentative writing revealing that these two variables significantly and positively related to each other; among the predictors (subscales of the critical thinking) of argumentative writing, inference, assumptions, arguments were the stronger predictors. Finally, gender was not found to significantly affect Iranian EFL learners’ argumentative writing achievement. The conclusions and implications of this study are pointed out with reference to foreign language teaching context.

Nagy (1988) states that vocabulary is a prerequisite factor in comprehension. Drawing upon a reductionist approach and having in mind the prospects for material development, this study aimed at creating an English for Academic Purposes Word List (EAPWL). The corpus of this study was compiled from a corpus containing 6479 pages of texts, 2,081,678 million tokens (running words) and 63825 types (individual words), and 2615 word families from online resources. The created EAPWL included 636 word families, which accounted for 12%of the tokens in the EAPWL under study. The high word frequency and the wide text coverage of this word list confirm that this word list plays an important role in English for Academic Purpose texts and hence can be a justified resource for material development in the field. From these findings, it can be concluded that the EAPWL created in this study can serve as a guide for material developers and syllabus designers especially in designing course-books, in addition learning these words by learners can help them in better understanding of their texts, and development in their writing and reading comprehension.

Since the emergence of the process-oriented approach to second language writing instruction two main questions have been what and how error feedback should be given to the students. The question of whether teachers should provide feedback on grammar in the writing assignments of English as a foreign language students, and if so how, has been a matter of considerable debate in the field of second language writing. The present study investigated the possible effect of implicit and explicit corrective feedback on descriptive writing accuracy of Iranian intermediate EFL learners (N=39) in Hamedan Islamic Azad University. Two groups were selected: explicit corrective feedback group (N=22) and implicit corrective feedback group (N=17). They received corrective feedback on three grammatical structures. The results showed that written corrective feedback can lead to writing accuracy improvement in the short-term, but it may be unhelpful in the long-run.

An overview of pedagogical interventions in the field of interlanguage pragmatics reveals the under-exploration of the processes in which changes in learners' second language (L2) pragmatic competence are established and that most of these investigations have focused on the product or final outcome of the learners' pragmatic development (Bardovi-Harlig, 1999; Kasper, 1996; Vyatkina & Belz, 2006). This study aimed to provide a qualitative analysis of the microgenetic development of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' pragmatic knowledge of request speech act. A total of 140 male and female participants received instruction on request strategy types and internal and external modification devices for seven sessions (weeks) through consciousness-raising (C-R) tasks. The data were collected after instructional sessions during the first, third, fifth, and seventh weeks through discourse completion tests (DCTs). The results indicated that, in the course of time, the participants stopped using direct request strategies and employed conventionally indirect strategies more frequently in situations involving high-status interlocutors and high-imposition requests. Moreover, as time progressed, the learners became more preoccupied with pragmatic appropriateness rather than grammatical correctness. The results of the study suggest that C-R instructional tasks offer an effective means of teaching pragmatics. Considering request speech act, learners should become conscious of the significance of concepts such as status and imposition as well as internal and external modification devices in request formulation.

این مطالعه به بررسی روابط بین انگیزه ها، نگرش ها و فعالیت های آموزشی خانگی والدین ایرانی به سوی دوزبانگی (فارسی وانگلیسی) می پردازد. به همین منظور،از ۶۸ والدین زبان آموز جوان، خواسته شد که به پرسشنامه ای پاسخ دهند. لازم بذکر میباشد که هدف پرسشنامه مذکوربررسی نگرش ها، انگیزش، و فعالیت های آموزشی خانگی والدین به سوی دوزبانگی می باشد. نتایج ضریب همبستگی پیرسون و تحلیل رگرسیون خطی داده ها نشان داد که والدین نگرش مثبت کلی، انگیزه یکپارچه٬ و روشهای رسمی درفعالیت های آموزشی خانگی به کار می گیرند.علاوه بر این٬ یا فته ها نشان دادند که همبستگی مثبت معناداری بین نگرش ها، انگیزش و فعالیت های آموزشی خانگی والدین وجود دارد. ولیکن٬ تحلیل رگرسیون خطی داده ها نسبت به متغیر های مربوطه نشان داد که فقط متغیر انگیزه بر پراکنش فعالیت های آموزشی خانگی تأثیر چشمگیری دارد. پیامدهای بدست آمده ازنتایج برای معلمان٬ سیاست گذاران، و توسعه دهندگان برنامه درسی بهمراه برخی پیشنهادات در این مطالعه فراهم شده است.