Foreign Language Teaching and Research

The present study was carried out to investigate the effects of listening strategy instruction on students’ listening achievement and strategy use. The participants of the study were 50 English major freshman students of Dilla University. These Students were placed in experimental and control conditions for the purpose of comparing the mean difference between the two groups. The control group was taught listening skills by the conventional approach while experimental group was given explicit listening strategy instruction. The study followed pretest-posttest control group experimental design. The main instruments used to collect data were IELTS listening tests and Strategy Inventory for Language Learners (SILL) which was adapted to listening skills strategy inventory. The study employed statistical techniques to analyze the data obtained from listening tests and Listening Strategy Inventory for Listening. To this effect, independent-samples t test and repeated measures t test were used to examine whether the listening tests/inventory mean differences between and within groups were statistically significant. The findings revealed that listening strategy instruction was more effective and had a positive impact on students’ academic achievement in listening than the conventional approach. Moreover, it was found that the instruction improved the participants’ strategy use.

The present study investigated the effect of blended online and face-to-face instruction on the use of reading strategies by Iranian EFL learners. Out of 100 pre-selected learners, 60 homogeneous participants were identified as intermediate, according to their scores on the Oxford Placement Test. The participants were assigned to experimental (n=30) and control (n=30) groups. Then, a pretest was administered to assess participants’ current knowledge of reading comprehension. Both groups received a 7-session reading instruction. Whereas the experimental group was subjected to blended online environment where they could take advantage of Nicenet platform, the participants in the control group received materials, instruction and feedback through traditional methods in the classroom. After the experiment, the participants were required to take a reading comprehension test similar pretest as the post-test. In order to compare the frequency of reading strategy use by the experimental and control groups, the participants in the two groups were asked to fill out the Reading Strategies Questionnaire both before and after the experiment. The results of t-test between pre- and post-test showed that there is a significant difference between the experimental group and the control group in using the reading strategies.The findings of this study could help EFL teachers and syllabus designers gain insights into the processes learners go through when reading.

Task-based language teaching is considered an effective way to achieve a harmony between grammar and communication. The present study investigates two different ways of teaching modal verbs: task-based versus traditional approaches. To this purpose, an Oxford Placement Test was administered to select 40 homogeneous participants out of a larger population who took this test. The selected participants were randomly divided into experimental and control groups of 20 students each. Those in the experimental group attended an English class six days a week, practicing grammar through tasked-based approach, while the control group did not receive any task-based work. The OPT was administered at the end of the semester again to see which group could do modal verbs better. A final test of modal verb tasks was also administered at the end of the study to see if all the learners have improved in using modal verbs in the same way/at the same amount through task-based language teaching. The results of this study indicated that there is a statistically significant difference between the experimental group and the control group, meaning that teaching modal verbs through task-based approaches has been more effective than teaching them in traditional ways. It was also revealed that the modal verb can was improved much more, while have to and must were improved less. The results of the study may have a significant implication for teaching modal verbs in particular and language learning in general.

The male-female differences in burnout and its possible effect on EFL teachers’ performance has not received much attention in the literature of burnout. To address this issue, the researchers conducted this study to investigate the effect of burnout and, more specifically, its three subcomponents–Emotional, Exhaustion (EE), Depersonalization (DP), and Personal Accomplishment (PA)–on the teaching performance of male and female EFL teachers in an L2 teaching/learning context. The participants of this study were 30 (15 males and 15 females) English teachers of five private language institutes and 150 students of the same teachers. The data were collected through the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Educator Survey (MBI-ES) and Characteristics of Successful Iranian EFL Teachers Questionnaire. Multiple regression analysis, independent-samples t test and descriptive statistics were used in the data analysis process. The results showed that burnout does not influence the teachers’ performance in a significant way. Additionally, it was revealed that there was no significant difference between the levels of burnout in male and female teachers. The findings challenge the common belief that burnout can greatly affect the teachers’ performance and that female teachers are more likely to experience burnout than male teachers, revealing instead that burnout does not significantly affect the performance of teachers and there is no significant difference between male and female teachers in their levels of burnout.

The present research was conducted to compare the efficiency of 3 groups of ESP instructors: content teachers, language teachers, and professional ESP teachers. The main question was aimed to investigate whether there was a significant difference between the 3 mentioned groups of ESP teachers and if there was, who was more qualified to teach ESP. To find the answer, a questionnaire was developed by the researchers, with an acceptable reliability and validity. The questionnaire was distributed to 135 students in several universities. The obtained results revealed that there was a significant difference between the 3 groups of teachers. Content teachers gained the least score, while language teachers and professional ESP teachers were located in the same subset and gained the highest score. It was concluded that language instructors and professional ESP teachers were more qualified to teach ESP.

This study tried to examine the relationship between language strategies/sources and ideologies, and how ideologies are constructed and expressed through language strategies in different English newspapers with different political contexts. The focus of the study was on the style of representation of Syrian civil war in Tehran-Times and Asharq Al-Awsat newspapers. The data from these newspapers were culled from 2012 to 2013. The analyzed texts, which was conducted on the basis of Van Dijk’s (2000) Us-Them and M.A.K. Halliday’s (1985) Transitivity Theory, revealed that the newspapers passivized, downgraded, legitimatized, delegitimized, euphemized, and demonized the involved parties in the war in order to show their desired parties’ standpoint as positive, their positive actions overstated and their negative actions understated. The findings of the study provides implications for syllabus designers, material developers, and language teachers to equip language learners with decent communication and increase their awareness regarding the use of different language sources in a variety of communication contexts.

The present study attempted to investigate the impact of cooperation versus collaboration on college students` reading ability. To fulfill the purpose of the study, 90 participants were chosen from among 140 by means of administering the Nelson Proficiency Test. They were divided into three groups: cooperative group, collaborative group, and control group. A fifty-item multiple-choice reading vocabulary test was developed, validated, and used as the pretest. The results of the one-way ANOVA showed that there was no significant difference among the groups. Then after a number of cooperative and collaborative strategies used as the treatment in this study in six sessions of ninety minutes for each experimental group class, (control group without treatment) the posttest, which resembled the pretest in many respects, was administered to the three groups. The results of one-way ANOVA and Scheffee Test showed that the cooperative and collaborative groups worked better than the control group, and the collaborative one performed best.