Foreign Language Teaching and Research

This paper is a part of a larger study that examines the development of students' English writing skills during the transition from school education to higher education in Syria, where English is a foreign language. The main objective of this paper is exploring teaching practices affect students transition from one level to the next via obtaining students' perceptions about writing, challenges they encounter while writing, and the strategies they use to overcome them. Two separate questionnaires were given to 206 school students from 7 different high schools across Latakia City and 206 first-year students at the Department of English Literature and Language, Tishreen University in Latakia. The main findings indicated that students of both levels were mostly concerned with grammar rather ideas and content, and with the product rather than the process of writing. Moreover, students lacked confidence in their writing ability and mostly depended on ready-made samples and teachers as the main sources of information. The study recommends changing the product-oriented approach to writing instruction currently adopted by school teachers, conducting effective teacher-training programs that include training them to develop students' writing by involving them in the writing process and teaching them how to use writing strategies effectively.

Web-quests are internet-based technology applications in which groups of students follow a specific set of steps toward the completion of a final project on a specific subject or a multi-disciplinary subject. The present study aimed to investigate the impacts of using web-quests on learning vocabulary by Iranian pre-university students. The sample of the study consisted of 72 students assigned into two groups. One of the groups represented the control group, and included 23 students; the other group represented the experimental group and comprised 49 students. The two groups were chosen from a population of pre-university students in Chadegan, Isfahan, Iran. The web-quest strategy was used in teaching the experimental group, while the traditional method was used with the control group in the second term of the school year 2015-2016. An Oxford Placement Test (OPT), a vocabulary pretest, a vocabulary posttest, and an attitude questionnaire were the data elicitation tools employed in this study. The collected data were analyzed using independent-samples t test, which was used to determine the existence of possible significant differences between the groups both before and after the instruction. The results indicated that there were statistically significant differences between both groups in favor of the experimental group. The conclusion, thus, could be that the students in the experimental group, who used the web-quest resources for learning vocabulary, performed significantly better than the students in the control group, who learnt vocabulary through traditional method of learning vocabulary. Finally, questionnaire data analyzed via one-sample t test indicated that the experimental group learners had a positive attitude towards the treatment they experienced in the experiment.

This study aimed to investigate whether there is any significant relationship between the readability and vocabulary profile including the most frequent words (K1 words) and academic word list (AWL) of reading passages of Four Corners series which were EFL textbooks. To determine the readability of the texts, the Flesch–Kincaid (1975) readability test was used, while the texts' academic word list and most frequent words which were the indicators of vocabulary profiler were calculated by Cobb's (2002) vocabulary profiler test. In order to analyze the data obtained Pearson Product-Moment correlation coefficients were exploited. With respect to the relationship between readability and most frequent words, there was no significant correlation between readability and K1 words. This means that whatever the text is more difficult, the number of K1 words does not change while it was thought if the text is more difficult the number of K1 words is lower. Concerning the relationship between readability and academic word list, no significant correlation between readability and academic word list was observed, either. In other words, the readability of these texts is not due to their academic word list. It can be concluded that some other factors such as sentence length, syntactic complexity, and learners' background knowledge might contribute to the difficulty of the texts.

Despite its direct relevance to second/foreign language learning, quality of life has been a neglected area within Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research. The present study sought to investigate the relationship between quality of life factors and speaking skill as one of the most challenging parts of L2 learning. To this end, an adapted version of life quality questionnaire originally devised by the World Health Organization (WHO) was administered to 100 female intermediate Iranian EFL learners. In addition, 30 of the participants were randomly selected to take part in follow-up semi-structured interviews which asked why the respondents felt the way they reported. The analysis of data obtained from questionnaire and interviews revealed that although all the four domains of life quality namely physical, psychological, social, and environmental domains had impact on the speaking ability of the participants, a number of facets in physical and psychological domains were more influential. Furthermore, the statistical Pearson correlation analysis demonstrated a positive correlation between life quality factors dominating learner’s success in speaking tasks. The findings of this study have implications for teacher educators and educational decision makers in bringing about higher levels of speaking ability and Quality Of Life (QOL) among English language learners.

In translation, choosing appropriate equivalent is essential to convey the right message from source-text to target-text, and one of the issues that may have a determinative role in appropriate equivalent choice is the semantic prosody (SP) behavior of words and the relation existing between the SP of a word and semantic senses (i.e. negativity, positivity or neutrality) of its collocations in the context. This research explored the impact of Iranian translator trainees' semantic prosody knowledge on the appropriate selection of equivalents in translation. The probable influence of proficiency level or fields of study on the appropriate selection of equivalents with respect to SP was concentrated as well. To fulfill the aims of the study, a translation test including a number of near-synonym pairs with different SPs was administered among participants with different fields of study as well as different proficiency levels. Findings were analyzed based on Sinclair's (1996) hypothesis of SP as well as Stubbs' (1995) model of SP classification. The study showed where there is more than one equivalent of a word in another language, having the knowledge and being aware of the conditions of semantic prosody is necessary to select the appropriate, accurate equivalents and thus to convey the exact message from a source text to the target one. The results also revealed that proficiency level and field of study among language learners can have an influence on choosing appropriate equivalents with respect to SP. The findings of the present study can be beneficial for the instructors and learners in both fields of translation and Teaching English as a Foreign Language to improve equivalent choice appropriateness. Also, this study by highlighting the essential role of semantic prosody in selecting appropriate equivalents can be beneficial to dictionary compilers to include semantic prosody behaviors in the definition and information of words.

This study explored the relationship among EFL teachers’ self-efficacy, language proficiency, and classroom management. A total of 110 Iranian EFL teachers of different levels of high schools and private language schools in Tehran participated in this research. The data were collected through two questionnaires and one test: the Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale and a sample TOEFL were administered in two different sessions while two sessions of each teacher’s class were observed by two raters who used the Murdoch(2000) checklist to score the effectiveness of each teacher’s teaching. To find out the relationship among the three variables of this study, that is the teachers’ self-efficacy, language proficiency, and classroom management, a Pearson correlation was carried out. The results revealed that teachers’ self-efficacy was correlated with their language proficiency and that language proficiency and effective classroom management were not correlated. The study provides useful insights into the need to help teachers develop their language proficiency that, in turn, has relevance for their self-efficacy.

This experimental study considered the effects of learning style variations on EFL learners’ performance in different question types of the reading skill and their strategies to get higher scores. To achieve such goals, ninety learners with different academic backgrounds from IELTS classes of Shukuh English Language Institute in Tehran, participated in this study. The researcher first utilized two questionnaires with regard to learning styles and strategy uses. According to the Kolb’s questionnaire it is believed that learners have Activist, Theorist, Pragmatist and Reflector learning styles. A majority of candidates were recognized as Reflector but activist candidates had a better performance in IELTS and also for strategy use. In considering learning style variation according to the results of the one-way analysis of variance, we were on the safe side to say that variation due to belonging to different style groups causes variation of performance for Yes, No, not given questions in reading skill. The most favorable learning strategy of the activist learners, who were the most successful students according to their band scores, was making summaries which had not only the highest frequency, but also the highest weighted sum.

Although most researchers have recently considered the role of test-taking strategies as one of the most vital factors in test taking process, it has been ignored by most EFL teachers in educational and academic settings including Iran. Because of the importance of test-taking strategies in EFL learners’ performance in tests, this research was set out to examine what strategies Iranian EFL test takers employed in reading comprehension tests. Furthermore, the present paper aimed at finding any possible relationship between test-taking strategies and test takers’ performance on reading comprehension tests. Discovering the best predictors of EFL reading test performance among several categories of test-taking strategies was also investigated. To this end, 135 EFL students were chosen based on their availability. All of the students were female, majoring in different fields of study. Three kinds of materials including multiple-choice reading comprehension tests, a questionnaire, and interviews were utilized to investigate the research questions. Data analysis included descriptive statistics, Pearson Product Correlation, and stepwise regression. The results showed a significant, positive, but low correlation between the students’ total reading score and planning and also monitoring strategies. Furthermore, planning strategy proved to be a predictor of English reading comprehension test.

This study sought to compare Iranian EFL novice and expert teachers regarding their professional knowledge at Iranian language institutes and universities. To achieve the aim of study, a questionnaire was developed based on the literature, the theoretical framework and the results of a qualitative study carried out by Yazdanpanah and Sahragard (2017). This questionnaire was administered to the whole sample of the study who was 200 Iranian EFL teachers from different genders and educational contexts. The participants were selected conveniently as going through random sampling was not possible. Based on the results of the exploratory factor analysis, six factors emerged under the main category of professional knowledge for Iranian EFL teachers. The findings of this study revealed that: (a) Iranian EFL expert teachers have higher levels of professional knowledge than Iranian EFL novice teachers (b) expert teachers have higher levels of knowledge about language and knowledge of language skills and components than novice teachers (c) expert and novice participants of this study are more or less similar in the modification they make in their teaching presentation, and d) there was not a significant difference between Iranian EFL expert teachers and Iranian EFL novice teachers due to knowledge of language teaching, knowledge of teaching methods and knowledge of language learning.