جستارهای زبانی (پژوهش های زبان و ادبیات تطبیقی)

The present study investigated the impact of language learning strategy instruction on the enhancement of less successful Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ L2 achievement. To this end, 40 less successful EFL students took part in the study, 20 of whom were trained based on CALLA (Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach) and the rest formed the control group. A complete TOEFL PBT test was administered to the 40 participants of the study to homogenize them in terms of language proficiency.The results of two independent samples t-tests and two separate paired samples t-tests indicated that explicit strategy instruction had a significant positive impact on L2 achievement of less successful Iranian EFL learners as the participants in the experimental group significantly outperformed their counterparts in the control group. The results of the current study might contribute to the educational policymakers, materials writers, syllabus designers, curriculum developers, and foreign language teachers to incorporate learning strategies in their policies, curricula, syllabi, materials, and instructional tasks if they intend to boost EFL learners’ L2 achievement.

Contemporary literature in English language teaching shows some impacts of oral narrations on learners’ speaking competence and phonological processing. However, little research has explored the relationship between this methodological practice and young learners’ L2 reading comprehension. This paper investigates the effect which story retelling has on young English learners’comprehension of reading. The researchers employed quantitative and qualitative approaches. Forty children were chosen from two different classes of a comparable level of proficiency and assigned into two groups for a two-month treatment. The results show that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group on the reading comprehension posttest. The questionnaire and observation data also indicated that the children responded positively to story retelling and that story retelling brought about excitement in the reading class, motivated young learners to read as well as shaped young learners’ behaviours and attitudes. This study suggests using story retelling more often in L2 language programs for young learners.

Instructional materials as a basic component of curriculums and a central constituent of standards-based programs play a provisional role in both setting the aims and leading the way. English textbooks in Iran’s public education are officially developed and used nationwide. One recently introduced English textbook series is Prospects (I-III) . It is intended for the the Iranian junior high schools and is normally supposed to guide teachers and provide students with the basic exposure to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. The textbooks, together with the lessons, have to be aligned in targeting educational objectives given the sequential nature of the intended grades and the serial contents of instruction. This study evaluated the vertical and horizontal alignment among the series’ textbooks and lessons drawing on Bloom’s revised taxonomy of educational objectives (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). The evaluation initially involved descriptive content analysis of the activities within and across the textbooks using a checklist developed based on the taxonomy. Then, the content matrixes were subjected to Porter et al.’s (2007) alignment index for the statistical assessment of lessons and textbooks’ alignment. The findings generally suggested that the lessons were tuned adequately, albeit accommodating mainly lower-order knowledge types and cognitive skills at the cost of discarding the higher-order ones. In addition, the statistically positive and significant PAIs of 0.93, 0.78, and 0.74 between Prospect I & II, Prospect I & III, and Prospect II & III, respectively pointed to a harmony in the series’ content. The paper discusses the findings and implications in the Iranian EFL context

Most studies on Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) have focused either on ESL or EFL teachers’ beliefs and practices. However, it is still not known how teachers who teach second or foreign languages other than English will provide information on the learners’ written language production. To bridge the gap in the literature, this current study reports on an interview study investigating nine university lecturers’ beliefs and their actual practices about WCF on an assignment done by the third-year exchange student of Thai as a foreign language (TFL). Quantitative and qualitative data were collected through feedback tasks and semi-structured interviews. The findings indicated that there was alignment between teachers’ beliefs of their WCF practice and their actual practice in terms of types of WCF and feedback techniques. However, the amount of feedback provided and the teachers’ time constraint, not the level of students’ ability as they thought, appeared to be the reasons for these misalignments of TFL teachers’ beliefs and practices

Decision making and pedagogical reasoning are regarded as two of the important concepts underlying teaching skills. This study aimed to first identify the novice Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ initial decision making and pedagogical reasoning in terms of managerial mode. More importantly, it sought to inform the teachers’ decisions and reasoning through some one-to-one feedback sessions, which were interactively held between every novice teacher and an experienced teacher. The participants were one experienced (male) and five novice (four females and one male) teachers. To collect the data, a number of teaching scenarios, classroom observations, stimulated recalls, and the Self-Evaluation of Teacher Talk (SETT) framework were used. The analysis of the data using conversation analysis showed that the novice teachers benefited from their negotiated interactions with the experienced teacher and applied the points regarding all five pedagogic goals of managerial mode in the framework. After the feedback sessions, the teachers could confidently defend their decisions pedagogically when enquired for reasons. The findings showed that modifying the teachers’ decision would not be successfully ensured until they reached the “aha” of the moment or a new understanding, which is the last stage in reforming one’s pedagogical reasoning. One way to achieve this moment is through raising the teachers’ awareness of the essential metalanguage. It is thus suggested that officials in charge and institute managers provide such learning opportunities for teachers so that they take more serious steps toward their own professional development through such frameworks as SETT

Following a case study research design, the present paper reports on a cross-cultural project (called Ibunka2019), in which the author monitored his English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing classes. The project is an email-based exchange among learners of English from six countries (Algeria, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and the Netherlands). For data collection, the Algerian participants’ emic perspective was accessed via their self-reports, gained by a post-project online survey; besides, their messages produced as well as the discussions with them during and after the project made valuable retrospective data for the present study. Particularly, the study discusses the merits of the project relative to the writing module, manifestations of learner autonomy, and the challenges encountered. Moreover, it tackled other relevant issues, namely the integration of interculturality, EFL learner mindset, and lingua franca perspective. This study adds to the scarce literature within the Algerian context on telecollaborative EFL teaching and learning

Thai students’ writing in English is a chronic problem documented in the literature of English Language Teaching (ELT) in Thailand. However, little research has been conducted on how Thai teachers and students perceive the importance of English-writing and what difficulties and expectations/suggestions they have in teaching and learning this skill at upper-secondary schools (U-SS). This study, therefore, plans to fill this gap by employing two sets of surveys and semi-structured interviews with 114 teachers and 170 students from 30 different U-SS in the Northeastern part of Thailand and two provincial supervisors of Foreign-Language-Education Divisions (Pro-Sup). Besides their various stated personal and contextual problems in terms of time constraint, insufficient resources and poorly-motivated and mixed-ability students, national test structures and the presence of untrained English teachers, the participants acknowledged the importance of English-writing and expected to have this skill taught at all school levels. These findings suggest that to improve the teaching and learning practices of this skill at U-SS in Thailand and other countries with similar contexts, relevant support and necessary reforms from teachers, school leaders and national-test and policymakers are needed.

Despite the critical relationships among pragmatic action, context, and linguistic vs. non-linguistic resources for producing various adjacency pairs in foreign or second language (L2) exchanges, their interplay has not been adequately investigated. Therefore, the present study examined these relations in the production of request-refusal adjacency pairs. The needed data were collected from 108 upper-intermediate to advanced EFL learners. Three hundred conversations were audio-recorded from learners’ role-plays that involved making request-refusal adjacency pairs. MAXQDA software was used for data transcription, codification, and analysis. Data analysis revealed that request-refusal adjacency pairs were co-constructed in discursive contexts through multiple turns using both linguistic and nonlinguistic turn construction units (TCUs). Learners significantly used more linguistic rather than nonlinguistic TCUs and more sentential and clausal TCUs than phrasal and lexical TCUs. Moreover, the use of pauses and continuers was significantly more than laughter, facial expression, and body language. These findings have some pedagogical implications for teachers to raise learners’ awareness of context, action, and linguistic and nonlinguistic TCUs in the production of speech act adjacency pairs.

Driven by the concept of mediation, this study is set out to use sociocultrual theory as the theoretical framework to explore the mediation role of textbooks, specifically, the series Northstar in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university classes in Vietnam. Learning journals with guided questions are employed to collect data on how different aspects of English textbooks assist students’ learning in the classroom. Besides, transcripts of recorded classroom obervations are analysed to interpret how the textbooks formulate and faciliate students’ ideas related to the given tasks and generate their interaction in both the target language and the mother tongue. It is found from the students’ journals that the textbooks assist them in understanding the lesson contents and the images help them with visualizing the lessons. Besides, the students make use of the tasks/activities when practising language skills, especially the listening skill. The transcripts reveal the process in which students refer to their previous knowledge related to the topics/tasks provided in the textbooks to interact with one other. More speficially, the tasks and the ideas of other group members mediate more thoughts of the students, leading to collective knowledge construction and task completion. From the findings, recommendations for the use of textbooks in the framework of sociocultrual theory are put forward.

In any education context, teachers are mainly responsible for enacting the core values of classroom justice and equality. To address this notion, this qualitative study went through the exploration of the perceptions that Iranian EFL teachers had of classroom justice and its main dimensions. To this end, 31 EFL teachers, chosen through purposive sampling, filled out an open-ended questionnaire, and a sub-group of them participated in a semi-structured interview. The major findings, resulting from the content and thematic analyses of the data done both manually and through the MAXQDA software (Version 2020), revealed that first, all the participants, except one, regarded classroom justice as a crucial element of their instructional practice; second, interactional, procedural, and distributive dimensions of justice were reflected in the definitions that the teachers provided for classroom justice; and third, in line with the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of the study, the teachers conceptualized the classroom justice dimensions through their unique principles in relation to the various domains of classroom learning, teaching, assessment, and interactions. A pedagogical implication based on the findings is that by becoming aware of how they perceive justice in their instructional practice, teachers may take the initial strides toward enhancing their just treatment of students, and consequently, increase their professional effectiveness.

This meta-analysis study aimed to explore the effectiveness of Strategy-Based Teaching (SBT) in ELT (English Language Teaching). A total of 18 original studies (2000–2020), with 1834 participants of diverse learning and teaching contexts, conformed with the inclusion/ exclusion criteria, were employed to be analyzed in this study. To provide a comprehensive picture of the possible moderating factors, we included 21 moderators under three moderating sets. The impact of methodological criteria, such as eligibility revisions and substitution of alternative ranges of values for arbitrary or unclear decisions, was examined using sensitivity analyses. The findings revealed an overall significant, positive and medium effect of SBT on English learners’ outcomes for both fixed (g = 0.65) and random (g = 62) models. Moreover, meta-regression analysis results of moderating factors showed that the place, type, and design of the study had no significant predicting effect on SBT. It has been documented that the results of moderator analysis of language skills and components were also not significant. However, the results for moderating effect of language measurement instruments were found to be significant. Studies that employed standardized tests for language learning measurement revealed significantly higher mean effect size in comparison with those that used teachers’ assessments. Overall, SBT was found to be positively effective within a variety of teaching and learning contexts in ELT.

The present study was conducted to identify novice and experienced Iranian EFL teachers’ beliefs towards the most effective written corrective feedback types and the most serious errors they might address while correcting students’ paragraphs and see whether there exist any tensions between what they believed and what they practiced through the methodology of pre-observation interview, observation, and post-observation interview. The results revealed that for novice teachers, there were fewer tensions between their stated beliefs and observed practices, yet this tension was more obvious while interviewing experienced teachers. Some implications for language teacher education will also be discussed.

Si nous admettons avec l’idée de la néoténie linguistique que « parler une langue c’est exister à travers elle », donc le passage obligé qui initie l’ultime étape de l’appropriation d’une nouvelle langue est le passage de la langue in fieri à la langue in esse. Dans ce passage, le locuteur-pensant étend son être dans l’accomplissement de lui-même en rapport avec sa conscience de soi qui fait partie de la subjectivité. La conscience de soi en tant qu’élément essentiel de la pensée et de la spécificité du locuteur-pensant réside différemment dans la capacité réflexive des locuteurs-pensants. L’énoncé produit par le locuteur est capable de porter la trace d’un retour sur soi grâce à la dimension réflexive alors que dans l’absence de cette dimension, nous assistons à une forme d’activité dans la subjectivité du locuteur. Cette recherche a pour but de se focaliser sur la conscience de soi, son rôle lors de la production d’un énoncé ainsi que son rapport avec des unités de représentation via l’interprétation des philosophes ainsi que celle des linguistes. Nous tentons de voir dans certains énoncés comment elle devient une partie consubstantielle de l’identité propre du locuteur-pensant lors de la production linguistique