محمد داوودی

Advocating the inclusion of neurocognitive science concepts in English language teacher training curriculum is gaining more interest. However, little is known about the prospective teachers' perceptions of neurocognitive science core concepts. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the prospective ELT teachers' perceptions of the neurocognitive core concepts and the applications of them through the lens of four neuro-educational models in the classroom practices. Fifteen prospective Iranian ELT teachers were interviewed and the data were analyzed using the phenomenological method. The findings revealed that the prospective ELT teachers lacked a clear understanding of the neurocognitive concepts and their implications in classroom practices. The findings support the inclusion of neurocognitive science core concepts training in language teachers' professional development.

In the context of language socialization, second/foreign language (L2) instruction is a crucial context for secondary socialization, especially when it takes place outside the learners’ culture of origin. This study explored how Iranian EFL learners socialize through the rules of EFL classes and how gender, parents, and native language affect their language socialization during the COVID-19 pandemic. We focused on two fundamental principles of language socialization (Lee & Bucholtz, 2015): agency and identity. In this ethnographic study, we collected the data by observing two classes in a WhatsApp group, interviewing the learners four times through Skype, asking them to write down their reflections about their class procedure, and writing our reflections about teachers-students interactions. We used Direct Qualitative Content Analysis method to analyze the data. To simplify data classification and interpretation, we utilized the MAXQDA-2020 software. The findings revealed two sub-categories for learners’ agency (talent and experience) and three sub-categories for learners’ identity (gender, parents, and native language). The results also showed that language socialization is bidirectional, and learners face forms of negotiating, accepting, or rejecting their agency and identity across this socialization process. The learners’ L1 and culture influence their opinion about the English language and culture. Whether this effect is negative or positive depends on proficiency level, gender, and social context. Finally, cyberspace provided a suitable context for language socialization, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Findings showed several pedagogical implications for EFL teachers and learners.تجزیه و تحلیل داده ها دو زیرمقوله برای عاملیت زبان آموزان (استعداد و تجربه) و سه زیرمقوله برای هویت زبان آموزان (جنسیت، والدین و زبان بومی) را مشخص می سازد. نتایج این پژوهش همچنین نشان می دهد که جامعه پذیری زبان دوسویه است و زبان آموزان در طی فرآیند جامعه پذیری با اشکال مذاکره، پذیرش یا عدم پذیرش عاملیت و هویت خود مواجه می شوند. فرهنگ و زبان اول زبان آموز بر نظر او راجع به زبان و فرهنگ انگلیسی تأثیر می گذارد. چه این تأثیر منفی باشد چه مثبت بستگی به سطح بسندگی، جنسیت و بافت اجتماعی دارد. یافته ها به چندین پیامد آموزشی برای معلمان و فراگیران زبان انگلیسی دلالت دارند.

The present study aims at scrutinizing the inference complexity level (henceforth ICL) of test items of the Iranian State University TEFL Ph.D. entrance exam (ISUTPEE) from 2010 to 2017 through the lens of Kintsch's construction-integration theory (C-I) (Kintsch, 1988, 1998). Though there is ample research on inferencing in the field of reading comprehension, the existing literature reveals a serious gap in relation to inferencing complexity of test items in high-stakes exams that exert profound effects on the academic achievements of the individuals. Inferencing is examined in this study to explore the ICL of the test items of the Special Knowledge Test (SKT) according to three levels of memory representations of Kintsch's model: the surface model, the textbase, and the situation model. To this end, the test items for eight consecutive years of the ISUTPEE were examined in relation to the three distinct kinds of mental representations. To ensure the reliability of coding by the researchers, two other specialist coders assessed the ICL of 33% of the items. The intraclass correlation among the three sets of codes was 0.91. The results of the study showed that a large number of questions, accounting for more than 80% of the items, merely activate the surface and the textbase model of information representations in memory. Furthermore, the ICL for each of the four parts of SKT was examined. This analytical study carries a stark warning regarding a deficiency of systematic attention to ICL in the development of test items.

This study aims at investigating the Medical students’ English language needs as the first step for designing an alternative curriculum for teaching English for Medical Purposes (EMP). It also tries to examine if the needs of medical students are perceived differently by stakeholders in medical sciences. For so doing, a structured questionnaire was developed and distributed among 282 Medical Students, 12 instructors, and 15 practitioners studying and working at Birjand University of Medical Sciences, Iran. The collected data were analyzed by SPSS using statistical tests of Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis. The findings indicated that medical students need to be competent enough in all four language skills, considering the demanding nature of their profession in the future. They ranked the importance of language skills like reading, writing, speaking, and listening, respectively. Besides, the results of four Kruskal-Wallis tests indicated a statistically significant difference among the responses of the three groups regarding the importance of the subcomponents of speaking and listening skills. Six follow-up post hoc analyses showed that the differences lay between medical students and practitioners. The findings are discussed and the implications for policy and practice are made.