احمد عامری گلستان

Transmission-based teacher education programs have mostly dominated the field of teaching English as a foreign language. Considering the prominent position of critical pedagogical principles in prospective teachers’ perceptions of their professional roles and responsibilities, there is a need for detailed investigations of teacher education programs informed by the tenets of critical pedagogy in prospective teachers’ professional identity. There has been a paucity of research that addresses the impact of such programs on prospective teachers’ professional identity in an EFL context; therefore, this study intends to address the gap. This qualitative study was conducted to examine the role of a critical-informed teacher education program in influencing prospective EFL teachers’ professional identity construction. Participants were 19 prospective teachers whose process of professional identity construction were analysed through reflective journals, class discussions, and semi-structured interviews before and after the program. Results of the study revealed three major shifts in prospective teachers’ professional identity: “from a student’s voice to a teacher’s voice”, “from an uncritical attitude to developing agency”, “from a narrow view of ELT to a broad view”. To foster critical ideas in EFL prospective teachers, the study recommends the use of dialogic discussions and written reflective tasks in teacher education programs.

The study intended to examine the effects of Telegram on Iranian EFL learners' vocabulary knowledge and the attitude of them towards vocabulary learning. To this end, a group of 100 Iranian advanced EFL learners participated in an experimental design project. The participants were selected after they took the Oxford Quick Placement Test and they were divided into experimental and control groups. The participants of both groups had a three-week vocabulary instruction. The treatment was similar for both groups except for exercises done after the class. The participants in the experimental group were asked to fill out an attitudinal questionnaire after the treatment. Then, a vocabulary test was administered among the participants of both groups. Results of the independent-samples t-test run on the collected data indicated that participants of the experimental group outperformed those of the control group. The findings of the attitudinal questionnaire showed that the participants had positive attitude toward using Telegram. The conclusion drawn is that those in the experimental group were free in using the online group to interact with each other. Within this framework, learners in the experimental group indicated that they enjoyed this instruction as it was fun to embark on new technological learning methods

This study was intended to compare collaborative and individual task planning effects on Iranian EFL learners’ writing performance. Therefore, a group of 90 upper intermediate EFL learners were placed in three groups of Collaborative Task planning, Individual Task planning, and Control. In the experimental groups, participants were asked to do task planning collaboratively and individually. The first writing assignment was the pretest and the eighth one was the posttest. A rating scale which includes five equally weighted criteria for rating; namely, Organization, Content, Grammar, Mechanics, and Style as well as the Total score was used. After making sure about the inter-rater consistency, data were analyzed using one-way ANOVAs to examine the effects of task planning on EFL writing performance. Results indicated that task planning produced better writing performances in the experimental groups, when considering Total scores. Furthermore, the treatment was effective in Organization and Style. Nevertheless, it had no significant effects on Content, Grammar, and Mechanics. Results are in line with previous research on collaborative writing and task planning. However, the study was different because it made a distinction between collaborative and individual task planning. This study has practical implications for classroom practices and language teachers, and theoretical implications for a better understanding of sociocultural theories of second language learning.

This study investigates the benefits of e-collaborative and collaborative writing tasks on the perception of Iranian EFL learners in a process-oriented approach. The study involved 74 intermediate Iranian EFL students at Islamic Azad University, Isfahan Branch. They were divided into three groups by random assignment as two experimental groups and one control group. The experimental groups were required to perform their tasks in collaboration; only one of these two groups had access to the Telegram Application outside the classroom. The control group, however, followed the conventional method of learning how to write. The participants were required to write two journals during the course. They were asked to write about their understanding, attitude, and experience on the writing activity. There were 136 diary entries to be analyzed in order to discover the themes in them. These themes were literally the emerging concepts in the diary entries related to research question of the study about the participants’ perception. After the identification of these dominant themes, content analysis was performed to interpret the data. According to the results of the study, a high percentage of students’ satisfaction showed positive perceptions of e-collaborative activities, and they reported that the instructional implementation of an e-collaborative writing project with a five-stage writing process did assist EFL learners to accomplish a collaborative writing task.

Critical pedagogy is regarded as an exhaustive system of learning through which learners' critical consciousness, self-regulation and autonomy, individuality, and learning achievements are promoted. Therefore, 60 Iranian upper- intermediate EFL learners (both male and female) from among 75 students based on their OPT test scores were selected. These participants were divided into a control group (N = 30) and an experimental group (N = 30). In order to ascertain that the students in the two groups were homogeneous in terms of writing quantity, the writing pretest was administered. The control group (CG) received the traditional writing instructions, whereas the experimental group (EG), who was taught writing instructions as guideline, received critical pedagogy. After the treatment, the writing posttest was also constructed. The scores of the students on the placement test, writing pretest, and posttest of the two groups were analyzed using SPSS 20. In addition, an independent-sample t- test and a one-way ANCOVA were used to compare the CG and EG learners' writing quantity and quality on the posttest scores. The data obtained from the study indicated that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group counterparts. Implications for EFL teachers include drawing the attention to the importance and usefulness of critical pedagogy in L2 teaching classes.

Recent thrust of research has focused on non-conventional classrooms for teaching to EFL learners. Amongst the newly developed models, Unplugged Classroom Model (UCM) is the most debated one as textbooks are aside and the syllabus is based on conversation-driven activities. This study sought to determine the pros and cons of unplugged teaching for enhancing EFL learners' oral proficiency. From a pool of 317 intermediate and upper-intermediate Iranian EFL learners, 120 intermediate and upper-intermediate learners (60 each) were selected based on SPEAK NOW 1-4 Interview Placement Exam and were divided into conventional and non-conventional classrooms at each proficiency level. The participants in the non-conventional classrooms received unplugged instruction; whereas, their counterparts in the control group (conventional) classrooms were taught according to their textbook's instruction. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to measure learners' performances before and after instruction through paper-based exams and interviews. Participants' perspectives and viewpoints in the non-conventional classrooms were analyzed using the Community of Inquiry (CoI) questionnaire and the instructor's observations, respectively. The findings revealed that not only did the UCM participants enjoy collaborative learning but also enhanced their learning ability to produce more orally proficient utterances and to expand their gained knowledge in order to scaffold their classmates' conversation.

Unlike Lexical Projections, Functional Projections (Extended Projections) are more of an ‘abstract’ in nature. Therefore, Functional Projections seem to be acquired later than Lexical Projections by the L2 learners. The present study investigates Iranian L2 learners’ acquisition of English Extended Projections taking into account their level of grammatical proficiency. Specifically, the aim is to identify the level of grammatical proficiency at which the acquisition of Extended Projections could occur in the process of learning English by the Iranian students. Two hundred and seventy Iranian female L2 learners of English participated in this study. Participants were administered three tests with a ten-day interval between each test. First, an Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was used to classify the participants’ level of grammatical proficiency. Second, a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) was administered in order to assess the learners’ ability to recognize grammatical problems in Extended Projections. Finally, a picture description task (PDT) was administered to examine the learners’ ability to produce grammatical Extended Projections. The results indicated that the learners are able to recognize and produce English Extended Projections even at lower levels of grammatical proficiency. The results also showed that the learner’s recognition and production of English Extended Projection improves with their increased level of grammatical proficiency.

This study investigates the role structural priming plays in production of passive structures among Iranian EFL learners. In order to answer the research question, which asked whether structural priming effects result in an increase in the production of the target structure (i.e., passive structures), 60 Iranian EFL learners participated in the study. After taking the placement test, they were divided into four experimental and control groups, namely Experimental High-Proficiency, Experimental Mid-Proficiency, Control High-Proficiency, and Control Mid-Proficiency. Participants then took part in picture description sessions the results of which were subjected to a 2 x 2 analysis of variance. The results of the experiment showed that priming resulted in increased production of the target structure in question by experimental groups as compared with production by control groups. In addition, the results indicated that EFL level of proficiency made a significant difference in production of the target structures. It is believed that structural priming can be employed as an alternative technique for presenting certain grammatical structures

The present study was intended to investigate the impact of blended and classroom teaching methods on Iranian EFL learners’ writing. To this end, a group of 29 upper intermediate and advanced EFL learners were randomly placed in two groups: an experimental group, namely Blended Learning and a control group, namely Classroom Learning after taking part in a placement test. Participants of the Blended Learning group received traditional teaching methods of writing plus learning through the web. Participants of the Classroom Learning group, however, were taught based on the traditional teaching methods of writing and received the materials, instructions, and feedback merely through traditional methods. In order to collect the data, participants’ first piece of writing was regarded as the pretest and their last one was the posttest. The results of the independent-samples t-tests showed that participants of the Blended Learning group significantly outperformed the ones in the Classroom Learning group in their writing performances. In conclusion, the results of the study revealed that employing a blended teaching method can create a more desirable condition to enhance the EFL learners’ writing performance and that doing research in this field can be a promising area for those interested.