درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present empirical study investigated the relationship between Iranian undergraduate TEFL learners’ self-regulation and their self-efficacy. For this end, there have been a total number of 120 college students learning English as a foreign language who volunteered to complete the two quantitative questionnaires of self-regulation and self-efficacy respectively. The participants were informed of the anonymous nature of the data collection process in advance. They were also told that their responses would certainly be kept confidential and that they had the right to quit at any part of the survey. It took around 15–20 minutes for each respondent to complete the survey. In the meanwhile, some of the participants (around ten) also willingly answered the qualitative descriptive semi-structured questions of the interview, until that the interview responses were saturated. After the process of data collection, the findings were measured through correlation analysis, indicating that self-regulation and self-efficacy were jointly linked and had a directly positive relationship. Accordingly, it was revealed that the employment of these two highly associated psychological constructs could systematically guide and help learners to enhance their learning capabilities and lead them to ultimate desired learning goals. Ultimately, it was concluded from the findings of the current study that the delicate association between self-regulation and self-efficacy was really helpful for learners to lead them successfully to their academic goals.

Grades represent one of the most common sources of evidence of student achievement in classrooms, though their relationship with test scores has remained understudied, particularly in settings such as in Iran, where English is taught as a foreign language. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between graded and tested achievement with respect to gender and proficiency level differences. Teacher-assigned grades and standardized achievement test scores of 693 Iranian learners of English taught by 15 teachers were examined. Primary analyses focused on the validity of teacher grades and the subsequent Pearson correlation coefficients revealed that grades associated positively with externally-validated test scores obtained from reliable tests, an indication of the validity of teacher grading. Additionally, the results of independent-samples t-tests showed that female students outperformed male students on achievement tests, but with fluctuations across proficiency levels. Higher proficiency levels gave male participants an advantage over female participants in achievement tests. Moreover, male teachers were found to grade female participants more accurately than their female counterparts. Implications are discussed for informing teachers about the validation of their grading practices, as well as for teacher education programs and teachers’ professional development.

Due to the importance of idioms, many researchers and teachers have long sought to find ways of making idiom teaching and learning more effective. This study compared three visual mnemonic devices (pictures, mental imagery, and movie clips) in terms of their effect on EFL learners’ recognition and recall of English idioms. Ninety intermediate level EFL learners who were preparing themselves for IELTS participated in this study. They were in three groups of thirty members each. Each group was taught idioms using one of the afore-mentioned visual mnemonic devices. Receptive and productive tests of idioms were administered to all groups after the treatment. The one-way ANOVA procedure was used to analyze the collected data. The results revealed statistically significant differences among these devices, with pictures method being the most effective on both recognition and recall of idioms. The findings of the study can have significant theoretical as well as pedagogical implications for language researchers, textbook designers, curriculum developers, teachers, and language learners. 

Among the latest efficient approaches in language teaching, Task-based Language Teaching has turned up to be the main approach in a way that it is currently recognized as the leading teaching approach in language instruction (Ji & Pham, 2017). Using the proper tasks based on the proficiency level of the learners can facilitate the process of language learning. The present study aimed at investigating the effect of open and closed tasks on improving Iranian EFL learners’ oral performance at intermediate and advanced levels. This study is a quasi-experimental research with pretest and posttest design. The participants of the study included 55 female EFL learners at Jahadeh Daneshgahi language institute in Tabriz city, who were selected through cluster random sampling method. The data were collected through 10 open tasks and 10 closed tasks along with an oral pretest and an oral posttest checklist that examined grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, breakdown-response, interaction, and speech flow of learners’ oral performance. The tasks were selected from the Four Corner series (Richards & Bohlke, 2012). The data were analyzed by a two-way MANCOVA test and ANCOVA. The obtained results indicated that open and closed tasks can improve EFL learners’ oral performance and there is no significant difference between open and closed tasks in developing learners’ oral performance in both levels. Besides, at the advanced level, the amount of oral performance development is greater than the intermediate level. The outcomes of this study can be useful for EFL teachers and learners regarding using the optimal kind of tasks in improving oral performance.

The present study aimed to review the instruction of the L2 speech acts in English pragmatics in the Iranian context during the last two decades from 2000 to 2020. To this end, upon the completion of the study search, the retrieved articles were selected and analyzed based on the research domain.  The results of our synthesis from 54 studies carried out on the instruction of the speech act not only reveal that pragmatics is amenable to instruction but also unfold that the most frequently instructed speech act is the speech act of request which has been conducted in 29 studies, while the least instructed speech act is  invitation, used in only one study. Moreover, analyzing the data collection methods documented that Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT) is the most predominant method utilized in 36 papers during the last decades in English pragmatic instruction. With respect to the treatment types, it is illuminated that the most recurrent treatment type is explicit, implicit vs. control, followed by explicit vs. implicit, although other treatment types have been embarked on. As a final point, it is worth noting that 53 of the conducted studies utilized the quantitative method in their data analyses, whereas only one study implemented the qualitative method. The paper concludes with some avenues for further research.

: Corrective Feedback (CF) provision on performance involves calling attention to learners' erroneous utterances, which stimulates classroom language learning. Despite widespread research in this area, a controversy still exists as to the time of CF in communicative tasks especially when learners' task engagement is targeted. Employing 60 intermediate-level Iranian learners, a four-week study examined the effects of immediate versus delayed CF types on oral engagement, grammar gain as well as on Complexity, Accuracy and Fluency (CAF) in the context of a dictogloss task. The statistical analysis showed that despite statistically significant improvements in the case of Grammaticality Judgement Test (GJT) from the pre-test to the post-test, no statistically significant difference was found between the two groups with regard to their grammar gain, complexity, accuracy, fluency, as well as on their social and cognitive engagement. However, results in the case of behavioral and emotional engagement revealed that there were statistically significant differences between the two groups of immediate and delayed CFs. The findings of the present study call for more flexibility and confidence on the part of the teachers in providing either immediate or delayed CF whenever appropriate and without being concerned about the adverse effects of feedback