درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

One strategy that eases the process of teaching argumentative writing might be teaching them how to express their thoughts, beliefs, and in general, ideologies in academic essays. This study aimed to investigate the effect of teaching writing skills on ideology transfer in the academic writings of EFL students. To this end, a sequential mixed-methods design was used. Participants were 80 male and female IELTS candidates who were selected based on some criteria such as proficiency level, age, and educational background. A sample Mock Writing Task 2 and a sample IELTS Writing Task 2 were used as instruments in the pre-test and post-test respectively. Learners’ essays produced during these stages were analyzed based on Fairclough’s (2001) three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis: description, interpretation, and explanation. To analyze the data, content analysis methods were applied during which discursive strategies used by the candidates were identified and coded, and the frequency and percentage of them were calculated. After the analysis, the following themes were extracted in the participants’ writings, as representing ideology transfer: tendency towards representation of identity, use of active voices, use of first-person pronouns, social views, author visibility, ideology-laden concepts, and idea development. Moreover, there were significant changes in the post-test writings of the participants in terms of the number of discursive strategies used to express ideology. This shows that teaching writing skills can significantly affect EFL learners’ ability to transfer their ideology into academic writing. The findings can have some implications for EFL learners, teachers, and curriculum planners.

There have been a number of research concentrating on the request production of ESL/EFL, and native speakers. There have been some studies investigating the production of request speech act of EFLs and ESLs. However, no research has yet focused on the production differences of request speech act among Iranian EFLs and ESLs in terms of internal and external modification devices. First, the participants were given Oxford Placement Test (OPT) to determine their English proficiency level and 95 learners were chosen out of 123 ESLs and EFLs to respond to the scenarios adopted from Schauer (2009). Second, the scenarios were given to the participants via email or an already-made GoogleDoc link of the scenarios. The results of the independent t-test revealed that Iranian ESLs outperformed their EFL counterparts. The results regarding request head act, internal and external modifiers demonstrated that ESLs mostly applied conventionally indirect request strategies while EFLs mostly tended to apply direct request strategies. It was also revealed that requests produced by ESLs were more native-like with no or few grammatical mistakes and that both EFLs and ESLs utilized external modifiers more than internal modifiers. This study implies that due and sufficient attention is to be paid to EFLs since they lack sufficient exposure to L2 and such impoverished pragmatic input might result in inappropriate applications of speech acts in general and request speech act in particular.

Annually, researchers in various scientific fields publish their research results as technical reports or articles in proceedings or journals. The collocation of this type of data is used by search engines and digital libraries to search and access research publications, which usually retrieve related articles based on the query keywords instead of the article’s subjects. Consequently, accurate classification of scientific articles can increase the quality of users’ searches when seeking a scientific document in databases. The primary purpose of this paper is to provide a classification model to determine the scope of scientific articles. To this end, we proposed a model which uses the enriched contextualized knowledge of Persian articles through distributional semantics. Accordingly, identifying the specific field of each document and defining its domain by prominent enriched knowledge enhances the accuracy of scientific articles’ classification. To reach the goal, we enriched the contextualized embedding models, either ParsBERT or XLM-RoBERTa, with the latent topics to train a multilayer perceptron model. According to the experimental results, overall performance of the ParsBERT-NMF-1HT was 72.37% (macro) and 75.21% (micro) according to F-measure, with a statistical significance compared to the baseline (p<0.05).

Vocabulary learning can occur incidentally when explicit and implicit cognitive processes are at work. The present study investigated how frequently a set of (implicit/explicit) lexical strategies was used by Iranian learners of English while reading journalistic texts for comprehension, and how effective they were regarding vocabulary retention in incidental vocabulary learning. Also, it examined the role of gender in lexical strategy use in such a context. To this end, 40 upper-intermediate learners of English, including 20 males and 20 females, were selected and asked to read journalistic texts. To collect the data, think-aloud and a retention test (Vocabulary Knowledge Scale) were used. Descriptive and chi-square data analyses revealed that the most frequent lexical strategy was consulting a dictionary (particularly a bilingual dictionary), followed by inferring (particularly contextual strategies) and ignoring strategies. The male participants were found to use inferring strategies more frequently whereas the female participants were found to use the ignoring strategy more frequently. Moreover, significant differences were observed between explicit and implicit strategy types with higher lexical use and retention effect for explicit ones. Findings provide implications for L2 vocabulary learning. 

Virtual learning has been defined as any system of education and instruction that brings together participants who are separated by geographical distances or time. Significantly, in a virtual learning environment, interactive telecommunications systems are utilized to connect learners, resources, and instructors. As such, the present study sought to investigate the possible effect of a synchronous virtual learning environment on the reading comprehension of undergraduate EFL university students. To this end, from the population of students majoring in English translation at Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran, one control group, and one experimental group were non-probabilistically selected based on their availability. Indeed, thirty students were chosen for the control group and thirty students were nominated for the experimental group. Live interactive teaching rooms were utilized in the experimental group during the term, whereas asynchronous instructional practices were adopted in the control group within the study. According to the results of paired samples t-test, the experimental group, which was instructed by live interactive teaching rooms over the term, progressed at the end of the period as compared to the beginning of the term. Moreover, the independent samples t-test showed that the students' scores on the post-test in the experimental group were higher than that of the control group. Evidently, the results of the present study may have practical implications for EFL teachers, online instructors, distance education programmers, materials developers, and syllabus designers.

Studies in literary religious discourses, including recent Quranic studies, suggest that speech act theory provides the researchers with variable pragmatic tools to interpret meanings that are constructed upon the intention of the speaker. This study draws upon speech act theory (SAT) to analyse the two ubiquitous speech acts of promise and threat in the Holy Quran. Employing the speech acts of promise and threat in the Quran to the detailed analysis of felicity conditions, this study, while arguing for the compatibility of SAT to the language of Quran, concludes that the main impetus behind the speech acts of promise and threat is creating the motivation in the addressees to conduct good and avoid evil deeds; therefore, the rules and conditions that drive the illocutionary force of promise and threat perfectly align with the motivational language of the Holy Quran.

Professional learning community (PLC) has been a generally recognized model for promoting teacher development, including EFL teachers’ writing assessment literacy, intercultural teaching competence, digital literacy, and so on. However, research on whether the changes in beliefs of teachers engaging in a PLC affects their teaching competence is relatively scant. To fill this gap, the present study investigated the extent to which a PLC with intercultural components changed EFL teachers’ beliefs in intercultural teaching, which in turn affected their intercultural teaching competence. In doing so, adopting an exploratory sequential method, qualitative data from teachers and a questionnaire from students were collected and analyzed through NVIVO 12 and SPSS 26.0. The data analyses revealed significant changes in the EFL teachers’ knowledge construction, motivation inspired by peer interaction, and reflection on intercultural learning and teaching practices. These changes led to the transformations in their beliefs and practices concerning intercultural instruction, although individual orientations were observed in their pedagogical approaches. Furthermore, the study’s findings were supported by evidence of corresponding changes in students’ learning outcomes in the development of intercultural competence. The study highlights the significance of PLCs in enhancing EFL teachers’ intercultural teaching competence and their professional development.

Despite the increased research on various aspects of academic optimism (AO) in general education, this line of inquiry has not received adequate empirical attention in English language teacher education. The present mixed-methods study aimed to explore the role of AO in MALL-oriented listening instruction among Iranian EFL teachers, with a focus on variations in their experience ranges. A total of 168 teachers participated in the study and completed the study scales, and 15 teachers with higher levels of perceived AO were further interviewed to gather qualitative data. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to examine the quantitative data, while thematic analysis was conducted to analyze the qualitative data. The quantitative results indicated significant differences between novice, experienced, and highly experienced language teachers, with the latter holding more positive beliefs about AO and MALL in relation to listening. Additionally, a significant correlation was found between AO and MALL. The qualitative findings complemented the quantitative results by highlighting the pivotal role of academic optimism in driving teachers’ motivation, the positive impact of teachers’ optimistic attitudes on student engagement and motivation, and the pedagogical strategies employed by optimistic teachers to effectively incorporate MALL in their instructional practices. These findings provide implications for teachers and teacher educators, emphasizing the importance of integrating AO principles in MALL-related professional development courses to positively contribute to teachers’ professional growth. The study contributes to the limited empirical research on AO within the context of English language teacher education and provides valuable insights into the complex interplay between academic optimism, MALL-oriented listening instruction, and teacher-student interactions.

Reflective practice and noticing can be regarded as two essential concerns for novice teachers’ survival and development in their first practices. Therefore, this study was an attempt to explore how reflective practices activate novice English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ noticing. To that end, we conducted an instrumental case study to explore the role of reflective practice among Iranian novice EFL teachers in activating their noticing. An inductive-deductive thematic analysis of the data collected through teachers’ portfolios and semi-structured interviews indicated that novice teachers’ noticing could be activated and sharpened through teachers’ personal, cognitive, and professional developments addressed by reflective practice. Furthermore, the findings showed that there are relationships among novice teachers’ personal, cognitive, and professional developments and the components of teacher noticing, including framing, perceptual activities and exploration, and interaction, leading to sharpening novice EFL teachers’ noticing. Hence, it can be concluded reflective practice can activate novice EFL teachers' noticing, impacting their professional development through framing, interaction, perceptual activities, and exploration. The study has implications for EFL teacher education programs, where teacher educators can help teachers develop critical reflection skills to address problems in their classrooms.

Presenting the writer's voice and positioning it within the larger body of alternative voices is essential in academic writing. Realizing the challenges novice academic writers might experience while doing this, we selected and analyzed a corpus of 40 discussion chapters (timespan: 2010-2019) written by Iranian master's students. Following systemic functional perspective (Martin & White, 2005), we explored the engagement resources in the corpus to discover evaluative language choices and stance types. The results showed that although student writers actively engaged other voices and adopted a more balanced dialogically contractive and expansive stance, they employed fewer and less diverse linguistic devices. Moreover, these novice writers tended to avoid certainty and preferred more modest and cautious assertions. There was a great tendency to remain neutral toward other voices. In aligning with other voices, they preferred to present more supportive evaluations than critical ones as well as more explicit structures. They opted for implicit attitudes in evoking resources to show criticism. The implication of this study is for EAP and dissertation writing to novice writers.