مژگان رشتچی

The primary purpose of the present study was to explore whether there was any significant relationship between attitude, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction of Iranian EFL teachers on the one hand, and their choice of teaching strategies. Strategies mostly used by participants of the study with low, mid, and high levels of self-efficacy comprised another purpose of the study. To this end, a questionnaire was developed, piloted, validated, and its reliability was estimated for collecting the required data. Subsequently, based on cluster sampling, 420 male and female teachers from three different educational districts of Tehran responded to the questionnaire. Three separate MANOVAs were run to investigate the effect of teachers’ attitudes on strategies they employed for teaching grammar, vocabulary, and reading. This was followed by the same approach to study the effect of teachers’ self-efficacy and job-satisfaction levels, as well. The results revealed a significant relationship between three factors (attitude, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction) and teachers’ choice of teaching strategies. Moreover, based on the scores obtained from the answers to the questionnaire, participants were classified into three levels of low, mid, and high which corresponded with their degrees of attitude, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction. Accordingly, it was shown that high level of attitude, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction strongly affected teachers’ use of vocabulary teaching strategies; mid to high level of attitude and efficacy affected use of reading and grammar strategies. Also, it appeared that strategies for teaching vocabulary are used more frequently among teachers than grammar and reading.

In this study, the researchers investigated a critical aspect of EFL/ESL writing pedagogy-the impact of teacher written commentary on student writer’s earlier drafts. Compositions of 80 Iranian undergraduate English majors were commented on using a trio of imperatives, statements, and questions on both content and form. Overall, the results indicated that the comments in the imperative form helped students improve their EFL/ESL writing ability more than the other two types. However, the difference between statements and questions was found not to be significant. The findings of this study, once again, emphasized the need for EFL/ESL writing instructors to communicate to learners with appropriate types of written comments. Moreover, employing imperative sentences can orient student writers towards a more accurate (i.e. form-focused) and appropriate (i.e. content-focused) composition writing.

The present study was undertaken to investigate the impact of comparative critical reading strategy on the writing ability of Iranian learners who were learning English as a foreign language (EFL). In order to carry on the study, 60 participants (25 males and 35 females aged between 19 to 27) at intermediate level of language proficiency were randomly assigned to two groups; that is, the experimental and control groups. The participants in the experimental group experienced critical reading by comparing texts, whereas the members of the control group practiced reading texts in the traditional way and answered comprehension questions. The results of the comparisons between the means of the two groups through t-tests proved that practicing comparative critical reading strategy had a significant effect on the improvement of the writing ability of the experimental group. However, the comparison between the means showed no significant difference in the reading ability of the two groups.

This study attempted to investigate whether there was any significant difference between the speaking achievement of learners who were trained by means of audiotaped dialogue journal, dialogue journal writing, or traditional free speech. The participants, 45 male and female students aged between 21 and 32, were selected by random sampling from among free speech classes in an English teaching Institute in Tehran. On the basis of the scores obtained from an oral interview, a one way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed, and it was proved that the three groups were homogeneous in terms of their speaking ability. Yet, the ANOVA performed on the scores of the learners after the treatment showed that the oral proficiency of the three groups differed significantly. A follow-up Tukey test revealed that the audiotaped dialogue journal group did not have any advantage over the dialogue journal writing group, whereas there was a statistically significant difference between the audiotaped dialogue journal group and the traditional free speech group.