درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Researchers have always been concerned with innovative approaches to facilitate the learning process for language learners. One of the facilitating strategies is guided discovery learning, which can help learners to develop their critical and analytical thinking skills. Hence, the present study is an attempt to discover the effects of guided discovery learning on the development of teenage and adult learners’ syntactic structures. The participants of this study were 34 male EFL Iranian learners in Iranmehr Language Institute, Aleshtar, Lorestan province, Iran. The participants were divided into two experimental groups based on their age (12 to 18 as teenagers, and 18 to 30 as adults). First, the Longman proficiency test was given to the participants to measure their language ability. After that, a pre-test was given to the students regarding syntactic structures before the treatment. Then, every two weeks a post-test was given to the students to assess their gradual development. One immediate and two delayed post-tests were given to the students. In this study, paired and independent samples t-tests were used to compare the development of syntactic structures in the studied groups. The results of this study showed that both groups (teenagers and adults) made an improvement but adults improved more significantly than teenagers. The findings of the study contributed to the practical employment of guided discovery learning as an effective teaching methodology, especially for adults in the process of language learning

One important aspect of pragmatic competence is the ability to comprehend and/or produce speech acts appropriately in different contexts. The acquisition and use of such an ability by non-native speakers of a language has been a major research line in interlanguage pragmatic competence (ILP) studies. Among different speech acts, the speech act of thanking is one of the most recurring acts, which has been comparatively less under the spotlight of ILP researchers. The purpose of this study is to explore how Iranian EFL learners express their gratitude and what thanking strategies they use in 14 different thanking situations. For this purpose, data were collected from 59 Iranian female advanced EFL learners through Written Discourse Completion Tasks (WDCT). Quantitative and qualitative analyses of data demonstrated a variety of thanking strategies were used by the participants in different thanking situations; however, the direct expression of gratitude without any preceding or succeeding complementary expression was the most frequently used strategy. Moreover, the diversity of different thanking strategies were almost similar in different thanking situations. The obtained results might imply that Iranian EFL learners need to be made more sensitive to both less direct and a wider variety of thanking speech act realization strategies.   

Recently, co-teaching has been employed as an instructional technique to accelerate and facilitate second or foreign language learning process. This study was set up to investigate the effectiveness of co-teaching on EFL students' writing ability and also to probe into their attitudes towards co-teaching. Two male Iranian EFL teachers with the same language experience and academic degree represented the writing co-teachers. Furthermore, two available classes of 20 students were utilized. Oxford Placement Test was first used to ensure the homogeneity of the participants in terms of language proficiency. Second, a writing pretest was run to assess the participants’ writing ability prior to the implantation of co-teaching. Third, the experimental group went through an eight-week instructional period with the two writing instructors while the control group was taught with a single teacher. Fourth, a writing posttest was administered to see how different the two groups were regarding their written performances. Finally, a semi-structured interview was also conducted to delve into the students’ overall attitudes towards the effectiveness of co-teaching. Regarding the qualitative phase, the researchers conducted the interviews and then transcribed them. Independent samples t-test results indicated that the experimental group outperformed their counterparts in the control group with regard to their written performances and participants in the experimental group held positive attitudes toward co-teaching. It behooves the stakeholders to delve into the potential pluses and minuses of co-instruction and determine how effective it can be for their intended audience under various pedagogic settings.

Teachers’ professional identity has been the topic of abundant research in recent few decades. It has been defined as the knowledge a teacher has of himself/herself in teaching contexts, and relationships that manifest themselves in practical professional undertakings. This study aimed at investigating the factors that most likely influence identity construction of Iranian EFL teachers. In this convergent mixed-method study, the data in the quantitative and the qualitative phases were collected, respectively, through a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The participants of the study were 75 English language teachers who teach in Iranian public schools. The quantitative data were analyzed by means of SPSS and the qualitative data were analyzed manually through thematic analysis. The findings showed that the majority of the participants believed that gaining experience has been the most determining factor in construction of their identities as EFL teachers. Other factors such as inspiration of previous teachers, peer learning and particularly the university programs, however, have been less effective or have had little effect in this regard. This study has implications for ELT stake-holders.

This study aimed at investigating the effect of process-based and genre- based approaches to writing instruction on Iranian EFL learners’ writing performance across high and low creativity levels. The study followed a quasi-experimental design and it was conducted with a homogenous sample of 72 learners who were selected from an initial group of 90 participants from a private language institute in Urmia, Iran. Based on the results of an English proficiency test known as Oxford Placement Test and a test of creativity known as Abedi-Schumacher Creativity Test, the participants were assigned into four groups of 18. The treatment period lasted for 10 sessions including pretest and posttest sessions. The results of ANCOVA statistics showed that the type of instruction had statistically significant effect on the learners’ writing performance, with the higher performance of genre-based over the process-based writing instruction, while the level of creativity had no significant effect on the participants’ writing scores. Furthermore, a significant interaction was observed between instruction type and the learners’ creativity level. The findings of this study have pedagogical implications for teachers, syllabus designers, and practitioners to use appropriate instructional methods in ELT with special attention on learners’ creativity levels.

Knowledge of verb-argument constructions (VACs) has been examined in a variety of contexts where English is mostly taught from the early stages of their schooling. No study has so far examined EFL learners’ knowledge of VACs in a context where English as a foreign language is taught only late at the secondary school level. The current study fills this gap by exploring construction knowledge in a context where teaching EFL is postponed until other languages have been introduced to learners. Using written essays of 180 students of 3 different proficiency groups, three indices of syntactic sophistication (i.e. the frequency of the Verb-argument constructions, the frequency of the verb-construction combinations and the verb-construction strength of association) were examined for their development across the three grade levels. As a second objective, this study examined the ability of these indices to predict students’ writing quality, through their grades. The results suggest that while the higher proficiency group showed a significant improvement in the rareness of their VACs, the three groups showed slow progress in the use of less frequent and less strongly associated verb-construction combinations. Similarly, only the index of construction sophistication (i.e. rareness) correlated significantly with and could predict variance in the writing score. This suggests that EFL learners follow a ‘necessary first’ principle in their learning of constructions. Similarly, these results indicate that the use of rare constructions enhances raters’ judgements of students’ writing quality.

Knowing how to think about the language learning process is conducive to effective learning especially in the case of grammar structures. Metacognition, a concept derived from cognitive psychology, can assist learners in this case. With regard to young adolescents at lower proficiency levels, there is a long-standing debate on whether to use L1 for teaching metacognitive strategies since learners might not be efficient enough in terms of understanding the concept of metacognition. Therefore, this small-scale experimental study focused on the effect of grammar instruction through the metacognitive intervention delivered in L1 on the EFL pre-intermediate learners' grammatical performance in English and investigated their attitudes towards grammar instruction delivered in L1. To fulfill these purposes, a homogenous group of 20 language learners was randomly divided into an experimental group ( n =10 ), which received grammar instruction through the metacognitive intervention delivered in L1, and a control group ( n =10 ), which received the instruction only in English without grammar instruction through the metacognitive intervention delivered in L1. The results of the independent samples t -test indicated that the experimental group did not outperform the control group in terms of all four English grammar points, namely present perfect, simple past tense, comparative and superlative adjectives, and past progressive . In addition, the findings obtained from the five-point Likert scale questionnaire which was distributed among the learners suggested that they had positive attitudes towards the use of L1 (Persian) in teaching English grammar. We argue that low working memory capacity, overreliance on translation, and less-cognitively activated L2 processes may account for the low performance of the experimental group learners in the grammar tests. The implication is that the L1 use in an L2 classroom can be helpful in teaching L2 grammar through the metacognitive intervention, but future studies need to examine how and to what extent L1 should be used to yield more effective results in the case of lower-proficiency learners in an EFL context.

This study aims at investigating second language learners’ preferences for receiving oral corrective feedback on lexical and grammatical errors in relation to their personality traits. Given the established benefits of providing corrective feedback, the question remains how to customize corrective feedback in order to be effective and appropriate to the individual’s personality. For this purpose, 324 language learners in a language institution were asked to complete Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) and feedback preference questionnaires. T-test showed that more extroverted learners prefer explicit and immediate feedback while more introverted ones prefer implicit and non-immediate feedback. Moreover, introverts preferred recasts for lexical and grammatical errors while extroverts preferred explicit correction and metalinguistic feedback the most. A follow-up content analysis of interview data revealed learners’ reasons regarding their preferences for receiving corrective feedback. Interviewed extroverts mentioned that explicit correction eliminated ambiguities of peer correction and metalinguistic feedback helped to feel independent. However, recasts were disliked by extroverts because they could not notice the correction, whereas welcomed by introverts due to their least obtrusive nature.