بیتا اسدی

lassroom interaction improves the learning process by enhancing opportunities for learning since both instructors and learners are involved in various speech acts. Speech act refers to a functional element in the form of an act assisting individuals to perceive or promote things with words in interaction. Thus, the current study investigated classroom interaction in terms of types and functions of speech acts performed by Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers and learners. The data for the study came from audio-recording of twelve 90-minute sessions taught by six experienced Iranian teachers. To analyze the conversational data, Finocchiaro and Brumfit’s (1983) model was used to examine various types of speech acts and Walsh’s (2006) SETT model was employed to delve into the functions of speech acts. Following the data analysis, it was unfolded that directives were the most frequent speech acts, including suggestions, requests, warning, and giving instruction, accompanied by interpersonal and personal ones. As to the functions of speech acts, the most frequent mode appeared to be the materials one (42%), accompanied by skills and systems (34%), classroom context (16%), and managerial (8%). The overall findings indicate the central role of the teacher in teacher-fronted classes in Iran as the most speech acts, i.e. about 79%, were performed by teachers in the form of requestive, suggestive, and advisory to control and promote the learning process. By carrying out the current study, it is hoped that readers gain more insight regarding the pragmatics territory, most notably speech acts.

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.