۱.
Literature review shows that there has been a plethora of studies on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers' motivation for teaching and the role which they play in motivating learners. However, it seems that types of motivational strategies employed by EFL teachers to motivate EFL learners in language institutes in Iran have not been sufficiently studied. In so doing, a qualitative research method was used and 25 EFL teachers who were selected through purposive sampling were interviewed. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed thematically. Results showed that EFL teachers use six macro strategies: L2 related values, teaching behaviors/teaching styles, appreciating learners' effort, prompting learner autonomy, Classroom atmosphere, and increasing learners' confidence. Each macro-strategy consists of several micro-strategies. Totally, 36 micro-strategies are used by EFL teachers to motivate EFL learners. It can be concluded that besides establishing and creating appropriate learning conditions, EFL teachers use both instrumental and integrative motivations to motivate EFL learners.
۲.
Teacher supervision has been one of the most researched, though debated, topics in education over the past several decades (Baily, 2009). Conducting a high quality supervision can be of substantial assistance in improving teachers’ instructional performance. This study was conducted to investigate the comparative effects of using three supervision techniques of data gathering including field note, audio-taping and video-taping on instructional performances of teachers and investigate the engaged parties’ (teachers’ and supervisors’) attitudes towards utilizing them in language teacher supervision. To this end, 12 novice teachers with less than one year of teaching experience and two experienced supervisors with 12 years of teaching and supervising experience participated in the study. The teachers were divided into three groups each supervised through one of the aforementioned techniques. The results revealed that video-taping technique of teacher supervision has the most significant effects on teachers’ instructional performance. Besides, teachers and supervisors have positive attitudes towards applying this technique for the data-gathering phase of supervision.
۳.
To launch an evidence source for successive judgment and decision making, program evaluation of any educational institute is an indispensable process, and language institutes are not the exceptions. In an attempt to propose a solution for a fundamental problem as the lack of a standard evaluation program for English language institutes, this study used a new method to be implemented in the context of ‘English language institutes (ELIs)’ of Iran. In this country, evaluation of nongovernmental centers, including ELIs, is carried out by the Ministry of Education (ME) using a performance evaluation framework which mainly collects the required data through a survey form (locally known as ‘Form 322’). We adopted and applied the survey form 322 into developing a specific questionnaire. Ninety ELIs administrators of Mazandaran were surveyed through an instrument that was piloted and validated through the obtained data. The extracted results from the questionnaire were sorted into the categories of “validation”, “improvement”, “redesigning”, and “researchers’ opinion”. The results showed that the original form, long used in the country, needs to be redesigned. To cross-validate the obtained data and the emerging results, fifteen volunteers from the participating institutes were interviewed for their ideas through Skype and direct interview. Consistent with the results, not only for Iran are an online platform and a standard evaluation and monitoring process recommended, but also an international integrated performance evaluation standard is strongly suggested for English language institutes.
۴.
The present research is an attempt to investigate Iranian EFL teachers’ professional development activities for teaching literacy. In this regard, experience, gender, and major of the EFL teachers in the Iranian institutes were taken into account. 268 EFL teachers (n=268) were randomly selected from among the teachers of English teaching in different language institutes in the east and center of Tehran (N=2700), based on Krejcie and Morgan’s (1970) table of sample size selection. The EFL teachers taking part in the present study received the Novice and Experienced Teacher Questionnaire (Rodríguez & McKay, 2010) based on which the researcher could diagnose if they were a novice or experienced. Then, they were asked to fill out the questionnaires of novice and experienced teacher questionnaire (Rodríguez & McKay, 2010) and teachers’ professional development questionnaire (Scheerens, 2010). The data were collected and analyzed via SPSS software; version 24, and then reported and checked against the quantitative research questions of the study. The results revealed that professional development is considered significant by both novice and experienced EFL teachers. However, the more experienced ones pay more attention to the activities which could pave the way for their promotion. In this regard, the teachers with English majors showed more interest in making use of PD activities, while no significant difference was found between the male and female teachers in this regard. The findings have implications for the EFL educational context.
۵.
With the shift of research attention from human malfunctioning to human optimal functioning in the workplace, job engagement which is regarded the opposite of job burnout has attracted researchers’ attention in organizational psychology. This exploratory study aimed to investigate the predictive role of emotional intelligence (EI) as a personal resource in determining levels of job engagement among Iranian English language teachers within job demands-resources model (JD-R). To this end, 442 English language teachers who were teaching in both public and private contexts were selected through non-probability convenience sampling and were surveyed regarding their demographic information, the perception of their levels of job engagement and emotional intelligence through a demographic questionnaire, the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES), and emotional intelligence scale. The results of hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that after controlling for the effect of demographic variables, there were significant positive predicting relationships between two emotional intelligence subscales of management of own emotions (MOE) and management of others’ emotions (MTE) and job engagement components of vigor, dedication, and absorption. The results imply that training teachers to improve their emotional intelligence can be a strategy to boost their job engagement.
۶.
As the overriding components of discourse, metadiscourse markers (MDMs) have been studied extensively through varying disciplines and paradigms and in different languages/cultures. However, when it comes to subdisciplinary realization of these features, particularly in medicine, we have to seemingly pave a long way. Identifying this gap, the present corpus-based study which is inspired by the metadiscourse taxonomy of Hyland (2005), focuses on exploration of 180 Medical Physics and Nursing research articles (RAs) as two rather distinct but comparable subfields of medicine across the quantitative and qualitative paradigms in English. It is expected that the findings will help in heading off the problems of the academic researchers and graduate students in writing RAs.
