احمدرضا اقتصادی رودی

Reading is the main language skill in English as a Foreign Language (EFL)contexts, and the key to the reading skill is the knowledge of the alphabet. Although there are various approaches to teaching early reading and the alphabet in L1, such as whole language, language experience, literature-based, whole word, alphabetic method, and analytic and synthetic phonics, the topic of teaching alphabet and early reading is almost missing in language teaching methodology textbooks, and the few sources which deal with the subject seem to be mainly concerned with English as a Second Language (ESL) contexts where the learners’ mother tongue also uses a Latin alphabet. Early reading and alphabet teaching in EFL contexts has also received little research attention, and many aspects of literacy teaching in these contexts such as the effectiveness of different approaches for different age groups are still a mystery. ELT community, hence, needs to pay more heed to the needs of teachers and learners in EFL contexts. This paper intends to sensitize the international ELT community, including the researchers, teachers, and publishers to the importance and necessity of taking early literacy in EFL contexts into account.

Flipped learning is a rather recent practice where the teacher provides the learners with the content of the teaching and videos of his or her teaching prior to the class meeting. Students are required to study and be prepared, and the class time is devoted to activities which involve higher-order thinking skills. This study aimed at assessing the perception of students of the flipped classroom and the effectiveness of flipped learning in a university testing and assessment class with bachelor's students of English Language Teaching. The first half of the semester was taught through the flipped strategy and a half was taught through traditional lecturing. Results indicated that students had a positive view towards flipped learning, and flipped learning led to a better performance of the students on the section of the exam which involved higher-order thinking skills such as application, analysis, and synthesis. Results further showed that successful intelligence was a better predictor of academic performance of the learners on the exams than the Big Five (NEO) personality traits, and creative intelligence was the component of successful intelligence significantly associated with students’ performance. It can be concluded that flipped teaching is worth the time and energy spent by the teacher and the learners on preparation for the classroom and it can motivate and engage learners.

With the shift of research attention from human malfunctioning to human optimal functioning in the workplace, job engagement which is regarded the opposite of job burnout has attracted researchers’ attention in organizational psychology. This exploratory study aimed to investigate the predictive role of emotional intelligence (EI) as a personal resource in determining levels of job engagement among Iranian English language teachers within job demands-resources model (JD-R). To this end, 442 English language teachers who were teaching in both public and private contexts were selected through non-probability convenience sampling and were surveyed regarding their demographic information, the perception of their levels of job engagement and emotional intelligence through a demographic questionnaire, the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES), and emotional intelligence scale. The results of hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that after controlling for the effect of demographic variables, there were significant positive predicting relationships between two emotional intelligence subscales of management of own emotions (MOE) and management of others’ emotions (MTE) and job engagement components of vigor, dedication, and absorption. The results imply that training teachers to improve their emotional intelligence can be a strategy to boost their job engagement.