درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Quality of teaching plays an important role in students’ achievement which is the main goal of education. So far, teacher education has witnessed widespread reforms to improve this quality with no clear evidence to uphold the claim that experienced teachers are more competent than beginning teachers. This study attempted to investigate whether years of teaching experience can make any significant difference in EFL teachers’ quality of teaching. For this purpose, classroom interactions of 90 teachers who were teaching English to 7th-grade students were observed by using Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). Findings showed better teaching quality in terms of instructional and emotional support for beginning teachers (0-3 years of teaching experience), but this dimension declined for transitioning (4-5) and experienced teachers (more than 5 years) with no evidence of a significant difference between them. The only superiority of experienced teachers was having better classroom management compared to other teachers with beginning teachers in the lowest position. These findings suggest that directed professional development programs and evidence-based learning can be beneficial for all teachers regardless of their years of teaching experience.

Translated texts have an in-between existence commonly referred to as hybridity; they belong to both source and target cultures, which indicates that hybridity is an inherent characteristic of translation. However, it is not only translated texts that contain hybridity, original texts do too, especially in the case of linguistic hybridity that is caused by non-standard language. All forms of non-standard language have their own sociolinguistic implications; their mere presence in a literary production conveys certain messages, which makes this presence a prominent one. It is equally important to find out what becomes of such language in the process of translation. Therefore, the current qualitative research picked four literary novels that featured at least one-character parading non-standard speech patterns, along with two Persian translations for each novel so that translators' styles could be compared. The target texts were inspected to observe cases of either neutralization or reproduction of non-standard language. The findings proved that most translators gravitate towards normalization, meaning that their readers would not be able to perceive the existence of different speech patterns in the story. Nevertheless, by employing diverse structures and terms, two translators managed to demonstrate that linguistic hybridity existed in their texts. Considering how dissimilar English and Persian dialects are, having transferred non-standard language through the translation process is an impressive accomplishment.

Evaluating the oral abilities of foreign language learners through online assessments attitudes a significant challenge for both teachers and students. Conducting skill evaluations in person, through direct interaction between the examiner and the learner, enables more authentic communication. However, shifting to a digital format and incorporating technological tools may cause discomfort among students and take away the friendly atmosphere of the assessment.This study aimed to investigate the impact of online assessment on the speaking complexity, accuracy, and fluency of intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. Initially, 50 learners took the Oxford Placement Test, with only 44 scoring between 50 and 60, placing them at level B1. These students were then divided into an experimental group and a control group. The Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) was administered as a pretest and posttest for both groups, alongside a speaking pretest to assess complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) scores. The experimental group underwent online assessment (OA) via the Adobe Connect platform, while the control group engaged in book exercises without any specific treatment. Following the intervention, both groups took a speaking posttest (TOEIC). Data analysis involved Pearson Correlation Coefficient, kurtosis, skewness, descriptive statistics, and sample t-tests. The findings revealed that online assessment significantly improved participants' speaking accuracy and fluency, although it did not have a significant impact on speaking complexity.

Circulation of scientific discoveries occurs in various discourse communities. Adopting an audience-oriented view of writing (Hyland, 2010) and drawing on the appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005), the current study aimed to explore the evaluative strategies psychologists would use to share their specialist knowledge with scholarly and non-scholarly readers. To this end, a corpus of 38 academic research articles and 38 popularized science articles from the archive of an English international refereed journal, Current Psychology , and two English popularized magazines, Newsweek and New Scientist , were analyzed in terms of attitude resources of appraisal, namely appreciation, affect, and judgment . The results of the study revealed that palpable degrees of persuasion were achieved through including certain attitude elements in both corpora despite no statistically significant difference. The results debunked the myth of objectivity in academic discourse and disclosed the psychology experts’ appealing to persuasive tools for convincing the specialist and non-specialists of the truth value of their research outcomes. The findings carry pedagogical implications for English for the students of psychology courses. Indeed, future psychologists need to get familiar with the common discursive strategies to address their intended audience in academic and non-academic settings.

The present study examined the effect of the online reformulation and collaborative feedback on Iranian learners’ writing in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context. To this end, three female intact classes (N = 55) at the upper-intermediate level were selected. Two of these classes were thence randomly selected as the experimental groups (1 & 2) and the other one as the control group. Experimental group 1 was provided with online writing feedback in the form of reformulation. Experimental group 2 received online feedback through reformulation followed by general online sessions with the participants for extra individual guidance, i.e., online collaborative feedback in the form of post-writing conferences. The control group experienced the same amount of online writing instruction. They were, however, provided feedback conventionally without reformulation tasks and collaborative feedback. To measure writing proficiency, IELTS task 2 was administered as the pre-treatment and the post-treatment test. One-way ANOVA and Post-hoc Tukey Test were used to compare the mean score of the composition tests between groups. The significant effect of online reformulation and collaborative feedback on writing was confirmed. This study has pedagogical implications for EFL English teachers and stakeholders in providing feedback on EFL learners’ writings.

Language assessment literacy has been addressed in a wealth of research. However, many studies have attempted to measure teachers’ assessment literacy, there is still a gap that prompted us to investigate the area from the EFL teachers' assessment literacy needs perspective. To accomplish the purpose, in line with the changes in classroom assessment over the past decades, this study was an attempt to develop and validate an inventory on Teachers Assessment Literacy Needs (TALNs). As the first stage, a set of items was generated through an extensive review of the relevant studies. In the quantitative phase, the developed inventory was administered to 159 English as a foreign language teachers selected through convenience sampling. An inventory construction and validation framework consisting of exploratory analyses was used to examine the construct validity of the proposed inventory. The results indicated that the inventory can be best explained by four components which are knowledge of language assessment literacy, consequences of language assessment literacy, processes of language assessment literacy and teachers’ expectations of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programs. The TALNs inventory developed in this study aimed to help practitioners and researchers to investigate teachers’ needs in assessment literacy. Fulcher’s (2012) assessment literacy framework was drawn on as the analytic model guiding the study.

Learning-oriented assessment (LOA) seeks to support instruction by providing information about students ’ current learning conditions and their ultimate performance. This study scrutinizes the application of LOA in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing classes within Iranian language institutes. In addition, the current study examined the participants’ writing traits using the researchers-developed writing traits questionnaire during the implementation of LOA. Sixty upper-intermediate students (male & female) in two intact classes at a language institute in Tabriz, Iran, were taken as the participants. One of these classes was randomly picked as the control and the other one as the experimental group. During the treatment, learners of the experimental group carried out the relevant writing tasks based on the principles of LOA. On the other hand, the control group adopted the teacher-centered approach. 120 IELTS writing task 2 samples were collected and scored by using a scoring rubric (Wang & Liao, 2008) before and after the LOA treatment. To realize the differences in the mean scores of students in the control group and the experimental group, an independent sample t-test was used. The findings showed that the students of the experimental group benefited vastly from multiple drafting, self, and peer-evaluation, sharing learning goals with teachers and each other, and using feedforward techniques instead of feedback. The results might provide both theory and pedagogy implications for syllabus designers and language teachers with valuable guidelines on improving writing assessment in IELTS writing courses.