رضا پیش قدم

The current study aimed at investigating the relationship between life-wise syllabus- as a new type of syllabus which emerged as the result of recent developments in applied ELT and corresponding to the "education for life"- and teacher success in an EFL context. Life-wise syllabus introduced by Pishghadam in 2011 directed English teachers’ attention to give priority to life issues rather than language in class. These new concepts encourage curriculum development based on life and all of its manifestations which is the core principle of humanistic education. Then teaching should not only comprise mathematics, chemistry, or literature, but also emotions, relationships, attitudes, thinking styles, feelings, and states of mind. Due to the recent emergence of this syllabus and the dearth of research over its effectiveness, this research study was carried out to shed more light on the issue. To this end, 200 teachers- 100 from private sector and 100 from public sector- and their 1771 students were chosen as the participants of the research study from Mashhad and Ghaen cities. In this study, the teachers were given "Life-Responsive Language Teaching beliefs Questionnaire" (hereafter LRLTB), and their students were given the "Characteristics of Successful EFL Teachers Questionnaire" (hereafter CSET). The results of the correlational study indicated that the main variables and also their subscales were highly correlated. The comparison between male and female teachers regarding correlation between variables did not show any significant difference. But the comparison between private and public school teachers in terms of the relationship between the variables displayed that they were more strongly correlated for the latter.

As a trigger to communication, motivation still includes undiscovered aspects which require further investigation. Hence, considering the newly proposed dual continuum model of motivation, this study investigated the relationships among willingness to communicate (WTC), active/passive motivation, and foreign language achievement (FLA) among 216 high school English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The modified version of the active/passive motivation scale (APMS) was revalidated using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed significant relationships among active/passive motivation, L2WTC, and FLA. Additionally, six models were proposed for the prediction of learners’ L2WTC and FLA. The findings indicated that socio-cultural and sensory-perceptual active motivation as well as cognitive and sensory-perceptual passive motivation significantly predict learners’ L2WTC, while only cognitive active motivation predicts FLA. Furthermore, passive motivation predicts FLA in all sub-constructs. Finally, active motivation is a negative predictor of FLA if mediated by L2WTC. Overall, the study highlights the importance of passive as well as active motivation in promoting WTC and improving FLA among EFL learners.

This paper aims at studying the speech act of congratulation in Persian and English with regard to semantic formulas. To gather the semantic formulas related to congratulation, the researchers chose 100 movies (50 in Persian and 50 in English) as the instrument of the study. The only model of cross-cultural comparison was related to that of Elwood (2004). Therefore, we used Elwood’s model as the yardstick to design a new classification for coding congratulation utterances. The new model which is designed in this study covers the categories of the Elwood’s model but omits the overlapping strategies which were observed in that model. The new model enjoys more clarity and is more clear-cut. Also, the non-congratulatory categories of Elwood’s model are deleted in the new design. Six generic categories were recognized as the model of analysis: (1) offering congratulation; (2) mentioning the occasion; (3) blessing wish; (4) expressing feeling; (5) divine statement; and (6) complimenting. In order to investigate the significant of differences between Persian and English categories, the researchers employed Chi-square formula. The results of the study revealed that a) there is a significant difference among various semantic formulas in each language and b) Persian and English congratulation utterances are significantly different with regard to mentioning the occasion, expressing feeling, and divine statement. However, no significant difference was observed with regard to complimenting, offering congratulation and blessing wish. Pedagogical implications are discussed in the context of EFL to link theory into practice.