Foreign Language Teaching and Research

These days the use of portfolio assessment is very popular. If it is believed that students at all levels should be doing more than studying for tests; teachers should be doing more than teaching to tests; students should take a more active role in the learning process; and, then the portfolio assessment is an idea worth exploring.. The aim of this study was to introduce portfolio assessment into our classrooms for improving students' reading comprehension. To achieve this goal, the researcher adopted the quasi-experimental design comprising the pretest-treatment-posttest paradigm. Two classes were selected as the experimental and control groups from Cambridge Institute in Sari. They were 52 female students. The only difference between the two groups was integrating portfolio into learning for the experimental group. The result of this study indicated that portfolio assessment did not have a significant effect on the students' reading skill.

The role of EFL lecturers’ first language (L1) in the EFL courses has been an ongoing debate. A monolingual approach to EFL suggests that the use of the target language solely in foreign language (FL) classroom improves learning of the target language. Accordingly, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the attitude of Iranian lecturers and EFL learners towards using L1 as a scaffolding tool in reading comprehension. As such, a mixed method design was employed and the data were collected from a sample of 80 Iranian EFL students and 15 lecturers. The quantitative data were collected through two questionnaires and the qualitative data were gathered using a semi-structured interview guided by the research objectives. The findings revealed that the participants perceived the use of L1 (Persian) as a scaffolding tool in their EFL classrooms and it was used to serve a number of purposes: to explain complex grammar, to translate new words, to define concepts, and to help each other in their groups. Moreover, lecturers believed that L1 helps learners’ improve EFL learners’ reading comprehension. It can be concluded that L1 can be utilized as a scaffolding strategy by learners and lecturers in facilitating their learning and it can be used as a pedagogical tool by the EFL learners to enhance their learning experiences as well as to maximize their engagement in the classroom.

This study aimed at investigating the possible impact of gender and proficiency level on the relationship between autonomy and listening comprehension ability among Iranian low and high proficiency male and female EFL learners. One hundred six English learners, based on the results of Oxford Placement Test (OPT), version II, took part in this study. Both female and male learners with the age range of 13 to 29 from two girl language institutes in Khomeynishahr and one boy school in Shahrekord participated in the study. The instruments of the study consisted of an OPT, an autonomy questionnaire, and two listening comprehension tests. First of all, the participants were required to take the OPT and autonomy questionnaire and then in a different session they were asked to sit for the listening comprehension tests. The collected data were analyzed by means of SPSS and the results of statistical analysis indicated that (1) gender could not modify the relationship, (2) proficiency level, on the other hand, had a significant effect on the relationship between autonomy and listening comprehension ability and those with higher proficiency outperformed the lower proficiency learners. The findings of this study could have implications for learners, teachers, and material developers.

Task-based language teaching has received increased attention in second language research. However, the combination of structured input-based approach and task-based language teaching has not been examined in relation to L2 grammar learning. To address this gap, the present study investigated how the structured input-based tasks with and without explicit information impacted learners’ grammar learning. The participants were 60 adult learners of English, assigned to two experimental groups and one control group. The two experimental groups were exposed to structured input-based tasks in two types of explicit and implicit information. A pretest-posttest design was employed in order to detect any improvement in participants’ grammar learning. The results revealed that (a) the experimental groups significantly outperformed the control group, (b) participants’ grammar learning significantly improved in both the experimental groups, (c) structured input-based tasks with explicit information was significantly superior to structured input-based tasks without explicit information.

Thematic development refers to the way theme and rheme in the clause are developed. The theory of rhetorical structure can be defined as the strategies that follow specific ways to make writing more persuasive. The present study aimed to examine how Iraqi writers maintain cohesion in the text by analyzing the patterns of thematic progression in various rhetorical sections in an online Iraqi newspaper, Azzaman (Zaman). To carry out the study, the news articles were collected from January 2013 to June 2013. Actually, 2 opinion articles which focused on the most important political issues were taken each month, collected and analyzed. The analysis focused on the thematic progression and rhetorical structures. The results revealed that thematic progression patterns were used in every rhetorical section of the newspaper. The findings of the study showed the occurrence of thematic progression with different rhetorical patterns in writing English opinion articles and the influence of culture on the rhetorical structure.

This study aimed to investigate how English language teaching textbooks portrayed male and female social actors according to their social roles and gender identities. To examine the linguistic representation of male and female social actors and construction of gender identities in ELT textbooks, Top Notch series was selected. To do so, attempts were made to analyze the series in terms of the features introduced in two analytical models: Van Leeuwen’s (1996) framework and Halliday's transitivity model (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). All of the sentences in reading passages and conversations were counted and analyzed critically through discursive features of these two models. The findings of this study revealed significant differences in representation of male and female social actors in some discursive features. Male social actors were described as more autonomous, successful, and active compared to female social actors.

Using rhetorical figures in specialized languages like the language of newspaper headlines is common. The present study attempted to conduct a contrastive analysis of the English and Persian sport newspaper headlines related to the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Toward this end, a corpus consisting of 400 English and 400 Persian headlines published during 12th of June to 13th of July, 2014 was collected. The framework developed by Lapsanska (2006), including phonological, lexical and morphological, syntactic, and semantic aspects, was employed. The frequencies of the use of sub-variables were calculated and chi-square tests were administered to determine whether the differences in the use of linguistic means between the two languages were statistically significant. The results showed that English and Persian sports newspaper headlines were similar in the use of rhythm and metaphor. However, they were generally different in four aspects particularly in the use of alliteration, foreign words, idiomatic constructions, formation of new words and phrases, hyperbole, phrase, and personification. The results can have pedagogical implications for journalism students, English for specific purposes (ESP) students, teachers, and translators.

The present study was carried out to investigate the effect of short stories on students’ reading comprehension, vocabulary power and attitude towards the skill and the new instructional materials. The participants of the study were 120 grade 9 students of Dilla Secondary and preparatory school. In order to gather data for the study, pre- and posttest of reading comprehension, pre and post test for vocabulary power and questionnaire were used. The students were placed in experimental and control conditions for the purpose of comparing the mean difference between the two groups. The study followed a quasi experimental design, i.e. pretest/posttest control group experimental design. The study employed statistical techniques to analyze the data obtained from reading comprehension tests and vocabulary tests. To this effect, a 2-tailed independent samples t-test and repeated measures t-test were used respectively to examine if the reading tests and vocabulary tests mean differences between and within groups were statistically significant. The findings revealed that teaching reading skills through short stories is more effective than teaching through the passages prepared at the Ministry, and has a positive impact on students’ academic achievement in reading and vocabulary power.

The present study aimed at investigating the relationship between three main characteristics of teachers; namely, perfectionism, leadership and empowerment, amongst Iranian English and math teachers. To do so, two groups of teachers were selected to participate in this study. One consisted of 177 math teachers and the other comprised 200 English teachers. All were teaching in Khorasan Razavi province, both in high schools and institutes. In order to collect the necessary data, three instruments (i.e. the Almost Perfect Scale–revised Questionnaire, School Participant Empowerment Questionnaire, and Leadership Practice Inventory) were employed. Having analyzed the data, the researchers found that the correlation among all the three variables were statistically significant for both math and English teachers. However, there was a statistically significant difference between math and English teachers regarding their leadership and empowerment, while no statistically significant difference was found between math and English teachers concerning their perfectionism.

In Iran, most English teachers’ method of teaching writing is merely to have students do some writing exercises or simply to give them writing tests without any instruction, but writing is not an easy task for students, and teachers should be able to do more to facilitate their students’ writing. One of the ways to aid writing is dynamic assessment via graduated prompt. The graduated prompting procedure provides intervention in the form of predetermined standardized prompts that are sequenced from general to more specific. The present study aimed at investigating the effect of DA on the improvement of Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ picture-cued writing tasks. The study was conducted with 35 Iranian EFL learners (male and female) who were randomly selected from an available population pool of 70 EFL learners enrolled in two language institutes in Esfahan, Iran. The data were collected via a pretest, a posttest and a questionnaire. The analysis of the test scores through t-test revealed that the experimental group did statistically better in the test. Furthermore, almost all of the participants held positive attitudes toward writing, and their confidence in their own English writing ability increased. The implication of the study is that dynamic assessment via graduated prompt can be incorporated into the regular writing program.