درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Practicum as a component of the English language teacher education program has been welcomed by pre-service teacher education institutes. Despite the great emphasis laid on practicum by Farhangian University, it has not been evaluated comprehensively by the student teachers and graduated student teachers up to now.  The main objective of the study was to explore the benefits and problems of the practicum program. To do so, a qualitative case study was employed. 25 informants were recruited using a purposive sampling procedure. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with student teachers and graduated student teachers. The interpretational and reflective analysis techniques were employed to analyze the data. The findings were content analyzed in terms of benefits/advantages and challenges of the practicum. They indicate that practicum courses make the student teachers ready for real teaching, help them learn about the realities of real teaching and overcome the negative attitudes and feelings about the teaching profession. It has been also found that the practicum program needs revision in terms of evaluation, quality of placement schools, and cooperation between mentors, university educators and student teachers. Findings can be used by teacher training institutes, practicum educators, school mentors, and EFL student teachers.

The literature on second/foreign language (L2/FL) discourse is replete with corpus-based studies into the use of various features representing lexical proficiency. Nonetheless, the lexical construct of English for academic purposes (EAP) texts developed by postgraduates majoring in teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) still sounds like a relatively unexplored domain that merits further multi-dimensional investigation. To narrow the gap, the authors in the current study set out to evaluate the lexical richness of a corpus containing doctoral dissertations written by Iranian TEFL students in terms of lexical density, diversity, and sophistication. Taking advantage of the computational tool Coh-Metrix to analyze the lexical features, the corpus was analyzed in comparison with a first language (L1) baseline containing doctoral dissertations written by English native speakers. The comparative analysis of the L1 and L2 corpora revealed that the texts written by Iranian TEFL learners were lexically less diverse but more sophisticated. Additionally, the lexical density of the L2 corpus exceeded that of the L1 one in terms of nouns and adjectives. Based on the results drawn from a discriminant function analysis (DFA), the features representing lexical sophistication and density were found to be the best predictors of lexical richness since they could significantly discriminate between the two sub-corpora. The findings may provide new insights into the ways of evaluating and enhancing the lexical richness of FL/L2 written discourse.

Culture is an integral facet of teaching and learning English as a foreign language. This qualitative study examined EFL teachers’ perceptions toward fostering their students’ cultural awareness in Iranian language schools. Based on a researcher-developed protocol, semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve EFL teachers from Tehran, Karaj, and Urmia, Iran, whose teaching experiences ranged from 6 to 19 years, with the purpose of identifying their perceptions, experiences, and challenges regarding fostering students’ cultural awareness. The interviews drew upon emergent methodology to categorize the interviewees’ value-laden comments into six major attitudinal themes of meaning of culture, the role of English culture and social norms in EFL teaching and learning, the materials and activities teachers employ to foster their students’ cultural awareness, benefits of teaching English culture in Iranian language schools, EFL teachers’ challenges regarding teaching English culture, and teachers’ suggestions or recommendations regarding teaching culture in the Iranian EFL context. The findings illustrated that despite the fact that Iranian EFL teachers preferred to include cultural content in their courses, they faced a variety of challenges regarding teaching English culture and social norms. Further, Iranian policymakers, stakeholders, and educators are expected to provide professional training opportunities for EFL teachers in teaching English culture. Thus, teaching culture should be underscored in EFL classes and instructors are required to explore and apply various effective strategies and authentic materials to enhance their language learners’ cultural knowledge. The implications are presented and discussed in more detail in the paper.

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between listening assessment task types, time on task, and the use of listening strategy by Iranian EFL learners. For this purpose, a group of 44 Iranian EFL students (Males and Females; 14 to 25 years old) selected through convenience sampling from an English language institute in Sanandaj participated in this study. Then, they were randomly assigned into four experimental groups. In one group, note-taking was considered the listening assessment task, while in the second group oral reproduction was specified as the assessment task for assessing listening comprehension. After that, each group was further subdivided randomly into a shorter time-on-task group (20 minutes) and a longer time-on-task group (40 minutes). Next, all groups completed Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal, and Tafaghodtari’s (2006) Meta-cognitive Awareness Listening Strategy Questionnaire. A two-way ANOVA was run to examine the effects of both listening assessment task type and time on task on listening strategy use among the four groups. The results revealed that the students in the oral reproduction task with high time on task group significantly showed higher preferences for choosing Planning-Evaluation, Mental Translation, and Problem-Solving strategies and those in the note-taking with low time on task group preferred the Directed-Attention strategy, while those in the note-taking with high time on task group preferred Person-Knowledge strategy.

The present study investigated the impact of language learning strategy instruction on the enhancement of less successful Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ L2 achievement. To this end, 40 less successful EFL students took part in the study, 20 of whom were trained based on CALLA (Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach) and the rest formed the control group. A complete TOEFL PBT test was administered to the 40 participants of the study to homogenize them in terms of language proficiency.The results of two independent samples t-tests and two separate paired samples t-tests indicated that explicit strategy instruction had a significant positive impact on L2 achievement of less successful Iranian EFL learners as the participants in the experimental group significantly outperformed their counterparts in the control group. The results of the current study might contribute to the educational policymakers, materials writers, syllabus designers, curriculum developers, and foreign language teachers to incorporate learning strategies in their policies, curricula, syllabi, materials, and instructional tasks if they intend to boost EFL learners’ L2 achievement.

Given its key role in enhancing learners’ communicative competence, willingness to communicate (WTC) has received much research attention in the field of second language (L2) teaching and learning. Numerous studies have explored the antecedents of WTC in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. As an attempt to shed more light on this line of research, this study was set to investigate the effects of grit and foreign language anxiety as predictors of L2 WTC among Iranian EFL learners. For this purpose, a number of 163 undergraduate English major students from several universities participated in this survey. The required data were collected by distributing valid and reliable instruments measuring the three target variables (i.e., WTC, grit, and anxiety). A structural equation modeling (SEM) approach was utilized to test the hypothesized structural models for the relations between these variables. The SEM results indicated that grit accounted for 10.6 % of the variance and FL anxiety explained 20% of the variance in the participants’ L2 WTC. Furthermore, the unique impact of foreign language anxiety on WTC was greater than that of grit. The implications of these findings for language teaching and learning are discussed at the end of the paper.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the acceptability of two Persian translations of Rowling's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by finding the position of each Persian translation in the literary polysystem of Iran. It also aimed to identify the most/least used translation strategies applied by each Persian translator, Morteza Madaninejad (2000) and Hamideh Ashkannezhand (2004), for translating culture-specific items (CSIs) from English into Persian. To do so, CSIs were extracted from the novel and classified based on Espindola and Vasconcellos's (2006) classification of cultural items. Then, Pederson's (2005) taxonomy of translation strategies was used to analyze the two Persian translations. The results indicated that Madaninejad preferred to use source oriented strategies. Thus, the translation he produced occupied the primary position in the literary polysystem. By contrast, Ashkannezhand had an interest in the use of target -oriented strategies. The findings have implications for translators of literary texts.