درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

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.

The provision of scaffolding entails contingent assistance given to learners. Despite the proliferation of research on scaffolding, scant attention has been devoted to studying the modes of classroom interaction in fulfilling various scaffolding intentions in content-based instruction (CBI). To narrow the gaps, the present qualitative study embarked on an investigation of science teachers’ scaffolding in four modes proposed by Walsh (2006), namely managerial, classroom context, skills and systems, and materials modes. Four science teachers participated in this qualitative study, and 12 sessions of science classes were observed and analyzed deductively based on four classroom modes through conversation analysis (CA). The content analysis of the videotaped recordings indicated that managerial and materials modes were frequently used to enhance students’ comprehension and develop classroom interaction. The findings evidenced that pedagogical objectives were mostly related to cognitive structuring, contingency management, and direction maintenance requirements. Furthermore, the findings revealed that students’ engagement and involvement through recruiting interest was the only scaffolding intention employed in all four modes to involve students in the learning process. The findings can provide insights to teachers and teacher educators in the realization of distinct scaffolding intentions in various classroom modes by delineating the interrelationship between language use and teaching purpose.  

In today's society, it is important for teachers, particularly foreign language teachers, to understand that reflectivity is considered as a main factor in growing teaching profession. This study sought to examine the different dimensions of reflective teaching among Iranian EFL teachers considering the variables of gender, academic degree , teaching experience ,and interactional effect between them .In doing so, initially using an explanatory sequential mixed method survey design a five–point Lickert scale ,29-items Reflective Teaching Questionnaire including (practical, meta-cognitive, critical, cognitive and affective ) was distributed to 142 EFL teachers (male and female) with 4 to 30+ years of professional experience with BA, MA, and PhD. academic degrees. Considering teaching experience, the participants were categorized into three groups.MANOVA results indicated the significant effect of teachers’ experience on their reflective teaching with the least effect reported on the affective dimension. Secondly, sixteen EFL teachers were invited to participate in an interview. The results of the present study will be useful for EFL teachers to have effective teaching, and to involve themselves more in exploring their students’ learning styles and critical aspects of the teaching context. Obviously, reflective teaching would help teachers to foster their independence. The analysis revealed that shortage of time, prescribed syllabi, predetermined textbooks, and ineffective teacher training programs were the main obstacles to reflectivity as experienced by the teachers. The outcomes have pedagogical implications for Iranian EFL teachers and theoreticians in the area of language teaching.

Writing by which students can be assessed plays an important function in the education process. By considering this fact, investigating the impact of graphic organizer strategy on improving Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ complexity of written performance was the main goal of this study. 40 intermediate EFL learners were selected as the participants of the study on the basis of findings of Preliminary English Test. After that, they were randomly divided into two experimental and control groups. To assess the initial writing ability of participants, two groups were given a pre-test prior to the treatment. After applying traditional method to the control group and the graphic organizer strategies to the experimental group, both groups received a post-test to examine the effect of materials. To examine the effectiveness of the treatment, an independent samples t-test was conducted. To see the progression amount between pre-test and post-test of the experimental group, a paired samples t-test was also employed. The findings of the study indicated that graphic organizer strategies improved the learners’ complexity of written performance. The results have some implications for EFL/ESL teachers, students, test and materials developers, and syllabus designers.

The forced transition to online instruction due to covid-19 pandemic brought about many changes and challenges. Therefore, evaluating these changes is of utmost importance. The study aimed to contribute to the existing literature by investigating the online adaptation of Iranian EFL high-school teachers. Purposive sampling was employed to approach the 20 teacher participants of the study. To this end, the researchers used semi-structured interviews to gather qualitative data concerning their perception towards of online instruction. The results of the study were promising. Although they reported many challenges and shortcomings, they believed those weaknesses motivated them to increase their digital literacy and integrate ICT into their approach. Moreover, teachers saw the pandemic as a forced opportunity and believed it was time to harness the power of ICT integration in post-pandemic education. Finally, all the study findings and possible implications are discussed, and suggestions are presented to prevent barriers to online instruction.

The first objective of the present study was to develop an inventory assessing EFL teachers’ professional identity perception (PIP) of technology-enhanced instructions (TEIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the findings of a semi-structured interview administered with three teachers following their actual implementation of TEIs, a 55-item EFL teachers’ PIP inventory of TEIs was developed. The second objective was to investigate the construct validity and reliability of teachers’ PIP inventory of TEIs by gathering data from 157 Iranian EFL teachers. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity verified the suitability of the data for factor analysis. The results of Exploratory Factor Analysis indicated a nine-factor solution for the inventory items. Moreover, the PIP inventory of TEIs enjoyed a reliability of 0.77 suggesting a high reliability. Regarding teachers’ perceptions, various personal, professional, situational, and contextual aspects of professional identity were specified in relation to the implementation of TEIs in Iranian higher education. Some distinctive findings of this study comprised the society’s perception toward TEIs and the role of teachers’ pedagogical beliefs in the implementation of TEIs. This study has some implications for stakeholders to devote due attention to all aspects of teachers’ professional identity in the implementation of TEIs during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Intersectionality refers to the experience of multi-faceted emotions from diverse angles (Crenshaw, 1989). This concept, originally developed in Western studies, has been applied to critical pedagogy, which concerns minority individuals in educational or vocational settings. The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of the concept of intersectionality in Second Language (L2) education and propose a new term for the main concept. Recent research has encouraged the use of quantitative and mixed-methods designs for measuring intersectionality. As such, the new term "discrima," derived from the Latin word "discrimen" meaning discrimination, is proposed to refer to the emotion experienced after discrimination. Intersectionality is used to pave the way for further steps in quantifying the intersectionality line of research.This study also explores what intersectionality is, where it originates, where it occurs in L2 education, and whether the concept can effectively express what should be expressed. The implications of this research are relevant to educational policymakers and course designers who can use the concept in real-world settings. Emphasizing the emotional aspects of intersectionality may help prevent unpleasant L2 learning and teaching experiences for minority groups. Therefore, this new term may facilitate promoting L2 education internationally. It would be beneficial for future research to provide more details about the significance of the new term "discrima" in measuring intersectionality and to offer examples of how the concept of intersectionality can be applied in L2 education.

Synesthesia, among other rhetorical devices, has played a prominent role in conveying the intended messages in the realm of poetry. Nonetheless, it has not grabbed adequate attention to its nature and function. Belonging to the domain of comparative literature, this essay has benefitted from analogy studies as its methodology to render novel perspectives in the meaning and reading of the poetry of Sitwell and Ebtehaj. Here, we have attempted, firstly, to foreground the function of synesthesia and, secondly, to enrich the understanding of the mentioned poets. This paper concludes that the realization of synesthesia heavily and helpfully affects the perception of literary poems. In addition, to showcase such influence, a reasonable number of poems by Sitwell and Ebtehaj were subjected to scrutiny, indicating that a great deal of their poetry is best understood only after investigating synesthesia. This essay is merely concentrated on two poets, yet its findings can be helpful for the whole field of poetry.

This study aimed to investigate the effect of task type (i.e., sentence fill-in/sentence writing) and word type (i.e., real/ pseudo) on initial learning and retention of 10 word meanings, taking the predictions of Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH) and Technique Feature Analysis (TFA) into account. Participants were 59 intermediate-level EFL learners from eight intact classes. Each intact class was randomly assigned to one of the four learning conditions: 1) sentence fill-in with real words, 2) sentence writing with real words, 3) sentence fill-in with pseudowords, and 4) sentence writing with pseudowords. Initial learning was measured by administering a meaning recall test immediately after the tasks and medium-term retention was measured by administering the same test with rearranged items one week after the tasks phase. The results of a mixed between-within subjects ANOVA did not show any significant interaction effect between test time and learning condition. Furthermore, the main effect for learning condition was not statistically significant but there was a significant main effect for test time, suggesting that participants’ scores dropped significantly from the immediate posttest to the delayed posttest. The findings of two independent-samples t-tests failed to show any significant difference between the immediate and delayed posttest scores of the participants who received either sentence fill-in or sentence writing tasks. However, some tentative findings demonstrated that those participants who were assigned to the sentence writing task achieved higher scores on the posttests. This finding indicates that TFA has probably more predictive power than ILH and it also provides some evidence in favor of the heavier weight of the evaluation component of the ILH when compared to its search component.

Adaptive teaching addresses students’ diversity and their immediate learning needs. Particularly, in the high-interactive context of English teaching, fostering adaptive teaching in teacher professional development programs not only stimulates teacher change at the micro level, but also facilitates implementing the organizational and curricular innovations imposed by authorities at the macro level. The current English teaching literature lacks a measure for evaluating and fostering adaptive teaching within higher education. Hence, within the present study, the Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth (IMTPG) was adapted and validated as a measure for evaluating and fostering teacher adaptability for 183 international English teachers in higher education. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was employed for validating two different enactment and reflection links in the original IMTPG, and the final adapted IMTPG for adaptive teaching (At-IMTPG) was proposed. The AT-IMTPG can be applied for evaluating how adaptive English teachers are, seeking to resolve the problem of implementing educational innovations by English teachers in higher education. It can also be used to design teacher professional growth programs for fostering adaptive teaching within English teaching higher education. Such a change in the classroom level is hoped to be translated into an educational change in English teaching higher education.

The ICTs have invaded not only the fields of business, economics, and different sciences, but also the field of education and particularly language teaching and learning. This article addresses a crucial issue related to the use of ICTs at the university in Morocco and its impact on the academic performance of students. Many studies in the review of literature are presented and they mainly revolve around similar issues related to advantages and disadvantages of ICTs in general, however little attention has been devoted to the relationship between ICTs and academic performance. Thus, this article seeks to answer a set of research questions along with hypotheses which are tested and discussed following some statistical procedures. The researcher looks at the correlation between the use of ICTs in higher education and students’ academic performance. A questionnaire was designed and submitted to a sample of students composed of 108 students from four major universities in Morocco. Cronbach’s alpha was obtained to test the reliability of the instrument. The findings indicate that the implementation of ICTs in higher education is positively correlated with the academic performance of students. The implications of this study suggest that integrating ICTs into higher education can lead to improved academic performance of students. This has significant implications for educators and policymakers who can use this information to design and implement effective ICT-based teaching and learning strategies to enhance student learning outcomes. The study also highlights the importance of considering the relationship between ICT use and academic performance in educational research and policy-making. The results provide a foundation for further research on the use of ICTs in higher education and their impact on student success.

In recent years, some language teachers have made investments in approaches and models such as mobile assisted flipped language learning. Some studies in Iran have examined flipped learning impact on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ language skills as well as language systems. However, no researches have been conducted on the impact mobile assisted flipped learning might have on improvement of intermediate EFL learners’ cohesive devices and their motivation to learn cohesion which is the focus of the current study. To this end, 40 female intermediate EFL learners in an English language institute in Kerman, Iran were recruited. Employing a quasi-experimental design, subjects were assigned to two classes of experimental (EG- N = 20) and control (CG-N = 20). Oxford Placement Test, researcher-made writing achievement tests, and Academic Motivation Scale (AMS) were utilized to collect the required data. The findings indicate that participants in mobile assisted flipped language learning group outperformed those in the control group. Moreover, the results of a chi-square test showed a significant relationship between mobile assisted flipped language learning and intermediate EFL learners’ motivation to learn cohesive devices. The findings might help stakeholders design, introduce, and address mobile assisted flipped language learning to their context-specific needs, thereby facilitating the language learning process.

The researchers in the current study were pinpointing the factors contributing to teacher motivation. Among the myriad of variables which were deemed liable to influence teacher motivation, the researchers opted for teacher motivation, namely teacher burnout, self-efficacy, emotional intelligence, and teaching style as the main predictive variables for teacher motivation. To conduct the study, a total of 200 English language teachers were asked to fill the study questionnaires. The target group encompassed teachers from both public school and language school contexts. The teachers were from both genders and came from a variety of age groups, years of experience, and language backgrounds. The participants were recruited from 10 cities across West Azarbaijan. To facilitate the data collection process, the questionnaires were sent to participants via Google forms link. The obtained data were analyzed through SEM (Structural Equation Modeling) to find the exact interrelationships between the four variables considered as predictors and teacher motivation. The findings pointed toward the existence of significant paths from burnout, self-efficacy, emotional intelligence (EI), and teaching styles toward teaching motivation. Additionally, EI, self-efficacy, and teaching styles were depicted to be significant predictors for burnout. The path from EI to self-efficacy was also significant. Furthermore, teaching style was significantly predicted by EI and self-efficacy. Finally, the findings obtained via interview analysis demonstrated that teacher motivation can be influenced by a variety of factors including low income and lack of environmental/social support, which can, in turn, lead to increased levels of burnout and hence diminish teaching efficacy and hence motivation. The implications of the findings are discussed throughout the paper.