مهران معماری

EFL learners who loved to read newspapers but have difficulty in comprehending. Present paper is a study on the significance of special styles of newspapers’ writing that may contribute in decreasing reading and comprehension skills for EFL learners and also is primarily concerned with the language and style of newspaper reportage. Skilled readers don’t just read, they interact with the text. The present study aims to probe into this important issue by providing formal instruction of the strategies to a group of Iranian EFL learners and comparing their newspapers’ reading comprehension performance with another group not receiving such an instruction.

As a negative consequence of COVID 19, almost all students felt obliged to leave the universities and use electronic devices to learn. Some universities encouraged faculty members to use Electronic teaching as an alternative to traditional classrooms. Despite a large number of studies on different forms of electronic learning, the effectiveness of synchronous and asynchronous E-learning in teaching grammar to EFL learners has been neither investigated nor compared appropriately. Two intact  classes of undergraduate students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) from Farhangiyan university were selected. and each received the treatment through either synchronous or asynchronous E-learning activities. The same syllabus consisting of dependent Clauses, Appostive, infinitives, and gerunds were taught to the two groups. EFL learners’ knowledge of grammar was  measured by recognition and production tests.  The two groups’ scores were submitted to repeated measures ANOVA tests. The findings showed that both modes of E-learning greatly influenced the language learners’ knowledge of grammar as measured by recognition and production tests. Results also showed that the interaction between electronic modes and grammar recognition and production tests was statistically significant. Therefore, it could be concluded that E-learning learning is useful, synchronous learning is more effective for improving the language learners’ production, and asynchronous learning is effective for improving the skills and subskills which require reflection and comprehension.  

Corrective feedback refers to a teacher or student’s reaction to a learner’s target language production containing an actual or perceived error. The last three decades have witnessed a large amount of research on the impacts of various types of corrective feedback on students’ written production. Along the same vein, the present study seeks to explore the effectiveness of providing teachers’ metalinguistic feedback vs. peers’ collaborative feedback on students’ writing performance. In so doing, the present study adopted a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design including three upper-intermediate groups (i.e., two experimental and one control). The participants of the study were a total of 62 English as a foreign language (EFL) freshman students from two public universities in Tehran, Iran. The writing tasks utilized in the present study were adopted from IELTS writing Task 2. The results of one-way between groups analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that students produced significantly more lexically diverse as well as grammatically accurate language as a result of both treatments. Moreover, it was observed that collaborative peer feedback led to significantly higher lexical diversity than those of other two groups. The findings of the present study suggest that L2 teachers can opt for a combination of corrective feedback strategies to help learners improve their writing performance.

The prevailing assumption in education is that students should have the ability to choose their writing topics and positions. However, this belief lacks substantial empirical evidence. To investigate this further, Semi-structured interviews with 40 male students in the field of English Language Teaching in Farhangian University who had completed two argumentative writing assignments in a university course were conducted. One assignment allowed them to choose their writing position, while the other assignment had the position assigned to them. These students were in their second to third year of study and possessed above-average writing skills. Our interview protocol focused on exploring their evolving perspectives on choice as a motivating factor in this specific writing assignment. Applying a grounded theory approach to thematic analysis, it became evident that students believed they should be able to choose their writing topics because they were more likely to be interested in them and had a better understanding of the subject matter. They also perceived that choice enhanced their motivation and the quality of their writing, ultimately influencing their grades. While most students in the study expressed a preference for choice, they also recognized several advantages of not having choice. These included the opportunity to enhance their writing skills, develop new perspectives, and cultivate tenacity in their writing.

Admittedly, as opposed to simple writing treatments, massed or spaced instructions, more or less, seem to add variety and attractiveness to writing accomplishment. The current attempt concerned the efficacy of putting in service the two above-mentioned distribution instructions on EFL learners' writing performance. To conclude, 40 upper-intermediate learners (19 to 23 years) of both gender enjoyed 8 sessions in an institute in Ilam, Iran. They were randomly divided into two groups of massed and spaced each group consisting of 20. Instruments utilized were a Quick Oxford Placement Test, a writing pre-test, and a writing post-test. One group was disciplined paragraph writing with massed and spaced instruction with accuracy, complexity and fluency in focus. The researchers taught each session in an intensive 60 minutes' session to massed groups, whereas the similar session was taught to the spaced groups in three 20-minute short sessions at irregular time intervals. Subjects were retested after 8 weeks. Lastly, a posttest of writing was carried out for all groups. The results of the paired samples t-test and One-way ANCOVA denoted that the spaced distribution group significantly outperformed the massed distribution group on the posttest in their final post-test.