درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The aim of this investigation has been to predict Viewing Comprehension through Aural and Picture Vocabulary Size among Iranian EFL Learners . To this end, 110 intermediate students were selected from two institutes of a city in Khorasan Razavi province, Iran. Pictorial vocabulary knowledge of learners was tested by Picture Vocabulary Size Test, Aural vocabulary knowledge was measured by Aural vocabulary size test and viewing comprehension was tested by a multiple-choice question test. All analyses were carried out using SPSS for Microsoft windows 22. Pearson product moment correlation analysis was run to analyze the relationship among viewing comprehension, picture vocabulary size and aural vocabulary . After the correlation analysis, we did step-wise multiple regression analysis to predict an outcome variable from two predictors . Interestingly, it was found that both picture and aural vocabulary size have a significant positive correlation with viewing comprehension. It was also proved that only aural vocabulary size can be considered as a significant predictor of EFL learners' viewing comprehension ability.

This study attempted to investigate the effect of using focused vs. unfocused metalinguistic feedback on Iranian EFL learners’ use of dependent clauses in writing. On the basis of an Oxford Quick Placement Test, 60 learners out of 90 intermediate female EFL learners with the age range of 17 to 27 from Melal language institute in Karaj were chosen to participate in the study. They were assigned to two experimental groups. The homogeneity of the two groups in terms of writing ability was determined by comparing their means in a writing pretest. The treatment was done through using focused feedback for the first experimental group and unfocused feedback in the second experimental group during 14 session. At the end of the treatment, a writing test was conducted as the posttest. The results of Paired Samples t-test showed that the participants in both experimental groups performed better in writing posttest. However, the results of one-way ANCOVA showed that there was no significant difference between the two groups’ means on the posttest scores of achievements in accurate use of dependent clauses between two groups. The results were discussed in relation to some implications and recommendations for further research.

Although global English Language Teaching (ELT) coursebooks have been subject to numerous (critical) analyses, the changes occurring to their contents over different editions have received scarce attention. In this study, the researchers examined the transformations over different editions of Interchange series (level 2) regarding some selected aspects of their textual contents. Seeking experienced English teachers’ views of the global coursebooks’ transformations over the past decade was another aim of the study. The analysis and comparison of the included topics and titles, characters, sites and contexts in Interchange series as well as interviews with 12 English teachers revealed that the content-based changes of different editions of this coursebook are superficial and cosmetic-like and despite the claims for globality, fallacies such as real-life-ness, representation and globality are still evident. We hope the findings of the study would aid curriculum and policy makers, institute managers, and language teachers to reconsider the functioning and value of current global ELT coursebooks.

There is scarce systematic research on the role of genres and their associated discourse features in Information Structure and its syntactic representations in Persian. The current descriptive, corpus-based study, therefore, aimed to investigate three different genres of Persian spoken language; that is, political, scientific and daily conversation, in terms of their Information Structure as realized through four syntactic devices of clefting, pseudo-clefting, passive and preposing. To this purpose, 1000 different utterances related to each of the mentioned genres, were extracted from the multi-media archive of IRNA (Iranian News Agency) website and daily conversations of the researchers’ family members and friends, based on Lambrecht’s theoretical framework in modeling the Information Structure. The collected data were then transcribed, the syntactic devices were identified, and descriptive statistics were used to see how the above syntactic devices are represented in each genre type. The results revealed that the devices are represented differently in the three genres of political, scientific, and daily conversations. This finding may be of interest to linguists and language theoreticians.

EFL learners’ ability to use advanced and varied vocabulary is a crucial issue in writing performance. This study aimed to investigate the effect of writing task type on lexical diversity and sophistication. The relationship between lexical sophistication and lexical diversity in the narrative, argumentative, and descriptive task types written by upper-intermediate EFL learners was also explored. To this end, 70 EFL upper -intermediate learners, enrolled in advanced writing tasks, were selected as the participants. They undertook narrative, descriptive, and argumentative writing tasks in a counterbalanced way. Then, Vocabulary Diversity (Voc-D) and Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity (MTLD) were used to measure lexical diversity. Lexical sophistication was measured using CELEX log frequency and Beyond 2000 Words (K3+). The writings were pasted into Coh-Metrix measure MTLD, Voc-D, and CELEX. VocabProfiler was also used to measure K3+ of the writings. In lieu of the purposes of the study, the research design involved repeated measures and correlation. Using Multivariate Analysis of Variance and Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient, the findings revealed that lexical diversity varied significantly across the three writing tasks. The highest scores of MTLD and Voc-D belonged to the narrative, argumentative, and descriptive writing tasks, respectively. Moreover, EFL learners used more advanced words in argumentative task type according to the measurement of CELEX and K3+ level words. However, learners' lexical sophistication in narrative and descriptive writings did not emerge as significantly different when measured by K3+. The significant positive relationship between lexical sophistication and lexical diversity was evident in all three task types.

The most effective means of directing attention to an article in the academic community is to publish it in credential journals, however, writing in English can be challenging for novice writers especially non-native speakers (NNS) of English. Thus, despite the ample research in some fields, there is a great need for studies comparing the rhetorical features together with move structure of sections of Research Articles (RA) written by native scholars with non-native (NN) scholars’ RAs to provide NN writers with academic writing patterns beside procedures needed for publishing in the field of Business Management. To this end, Hyland’s (2000) five-move model was employed for identifying rhetorical moves along with a “bottom-up” approach for realizing linguistic signals in the Abstract, Introduction and Conclusion sections of thirty articles from international and national journals. The study revealed correspondence of most international articles to Hyland’s move model, a tendency for writing informative Abstracts was apparent with the presence of all the moves in Introduction and Conclusion sections. Analysis of linguistic aspects of articles illustrated a striking difference in the use of language features between native and NN scholars. The findings of this study have some implications for people involved in genre analysis as well as teaching academic writing and material design.

In every field of teaching and learning, there are some factors that have an important role in both teachers’ and students’ performance. Two of these effective psychological factors in the context of education include self-efficacy and burnout. This research was conducted to examine the statistical relationship between English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ self-efficacy and burnout levels in the universities and schools of Iran. The data collection instruments were two questionnaires, ‘Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale’ and ‘Maslach Burnout Inventory’. The participants included 152 randomly selected teachers working in universities and schools. After data collection, the SPSS software was applied to convert the obtained data into numerical and interpretable data. To quantify the statistical relationship between teachers’ self-efficacy and burnout levels, correlational analysis was used. Results indicated, there was negative correlation between teachers’ self efficacy and burnout levels. Furthermore, multiple regression analysis was conducted to estimate the relationship between self-efficacy and burnout better, which indicated that teachers’ self efficacy was a negative predictor of their burnout.

Problem-based Learning (PBL) as one of the newest teaching methods in the area of language teaching in second and foreign contexts, has been used by teachers in the last two decades in different institutes. In the current study, attempts were made to find out the effect of the two PBL subcategories, i.e. Hybrid Problem-based Learning (H-PBL) and Pure Problem-based Learning (PPBL) in comparison to a traditional lecture-based method, on Iranian EFL university learners’ speaking skill and their self-confidence, by implementing these two methods in the EFL classroom using eight teacher-made real-world problems. To this purpose, 56 undergraduate participants of Payam Noor university (PNU) in Abadan, Iran, were randomly selected, divided into a control group and two treatment HPBL and PPBL groups. The statistical analysis of the obtained results of the participants’ pretest-posttest scores, through one-way ANCOVA and Man-Whitney U test, revealed that the treatment groups outperformed the control group in speaking skill and self-confidence The findings of the study might bear implications for teachers and university curriculum designers to take more proper approaches towards the instructing university participants.

Driven by the concept of mediation, this study is set out to use sociocultrual theory as the theoretical framework to explore the mediation role of textbooks, specifically, the series Northstar in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university classes in Vietnam. Learning journals with guided questions are employed to collect data on how different aspects of English textbooks assist students’ learning in the classroom. Besides, transcripts of recorded classroom obervations are analysed to interpret how the textbooks formulate and faciliate students’ ideas related to the given tasks and generate their interaction in both the target language and the mother tongue. It is found from the students’ journals that the textbooks assist them in understanding the lesson contents and the images help them with visualizing the lessons. Besides, the students make use of the tasks/activities when practising language skills, especially the listening skill. The transcripts reveal the process in which students refer to their previous knowledge related to the topics/tasks provided in the textbooks to interact with one other. More speficially, the tasks and the ideas of other group members mediate more thoughts of the students, leading to collective knowledge construction and task completion. From the findings, recommendations for the use of textbooks in the framework of sociocultrual theory are put forward.

World literature is replete with many texts that depict the imperialists using hypocritical language as an oppressive device for intimidating their subjects. The oppressors pretended to be the civilizers by inculcating the idea of “Benevolent Colonization” into the minds of the oppressed. In this paper, the researchers investigate how situational and linguistic contexts affect the meanings of utterances in George Orwell’s selected novels. It is aimed to remove the gaps in the multicultural world by scrutinizing the power of language pragmatically. The methodology is qualitative based on Grice’s theory of implicature. The novels under investigation both violate and adhere to the four maxims of Grice’s theory of Conversational Implicature. The findings of the paper indicate that language can be used as a suppressive weapon for supporting imperialist objectives or hamper satisfactory human relations, and that positive gifts of imperialism come with the caveat that they are being achieved at the cost of exploiting the oppressed.

Some universities in Iran have recently witnessed a shift in admission criteria from university admission test performance towards high school records. This sudden change seems to be unwarranted since the predictive power of high school records has not been explored. To fill in this gap, this study aims at showcasing the predictive validity of high school records for undergraduate students of English language and literature. To this end, a random sample of undergraduate students studying at Shahrood University of Technology were selected as the participants, the predictor variables were operationally defined as the participants’ grade point average (GPA) in three school subjects including English, Persian and Arabic languages along with their overall high school GPA, and the explained variable was operationalized as the participants’ overall GPA for the first academic year. The results of Pearson correlation revealed a significant but very low correlation between the variables of interest. Moreover, the results of multiple regression analysis revealed that none of the predictor variables well predicts academic success in English language and literature. Although the results of this study are case-specific, they have clear implications for policy makers and interested researchers nationwide.

Abstract: So far, the roles and responsibilities of teachers have undergone massive changes and teachers have been inundated with constant transition and workload. Consequently, the boundaries between work and home have been blurred and teachers are highly required to devote more and more time to their work. Such high expectations contribute to high stress which, in turn, leads to teachers’ occupational burnout. Despite a plethora of research which has investigated the relationship between burnout and various teachers’ variables, less is known about how Iranian English teachers at both public high schools and private language institutes perceive the sources and consequences of burnout in their work-lives. To bridge the gap, a phenomenological mixed-methods research was conducted. Questionnaires, interviews, and observations were used for data collection. First, the Maslach Burnout Inventory was distributed to identify burned out English teachers. Afterward, 62 burned-out English teachers (23 school and 29 institute teachers) were invited for interviews. To triangulate the data, classroom observations were also conducted. Results revealed that although school and institute teachers reported lots of similar sources and consequences for their stress and burnout, several substantial differences were observed due to the varying contexts. Moreover, it was found that both contextual and personal factors led to English teachers’ stress and burnout.

The use of storytelling on students’ first language literacy and development were extended to foreign/second language learning, and a large number of researchers interested in the field attempted to use storytelling and story reading strategies in teaching oral language skills to foreign/second language learners. Despite the existence of a number of studies on the impact of storytelling on English language skills, the number of studies on the impact of storytelling and story reading approaches on pre- intermediate EFL learners’ oral language production and comprehension seems to be scanty. To do so, a quasi- experimental study was employed. Ninety Iranian language learners, from 6 intact classes (each consisting of 15), were divided to three sub-groups: storytelling, story reading and conventional groups. To one group, stories were told, one group only read the stories, and the third group received no stories. The data were collected through researcher developed oral language production and comprehension tests. One-way-ANOVA test and three independent samples-tests based on Bonferroni test were employed to analyze the data and locate the sources of the differences. Findings revealed that storytelling outperformed story reading groups on both production and comprehension tests. Story reading group outperformed the conventional group. It can be concluded telling and reading stories are effective techniques for improving EFL learners’ oral language production and recognition.