درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

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.

This study explored the representation of the Initiation, Response, Feedback (IRF) cycle in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. Video recordings have been used to collect data from 10 classes, which were managed by 8 L2 teachers. In total, 900 minutes of video recordings with 784 triadic patterns were collected. Using Conversation Analysis (CA), the findings demonstrated that the IRFs in classroom interactions were disclosed in various ways. The coding system revealed that the teachers generally used authentic and focused questions. In the F stage, the teachers used elaboration, scaffolding, correction, and refusal strategies. The F stage was also a rich juncture for local contingencies as the teachers’ productions were contingent on the students’ responses. Likewise, uptake and scaffolding have been important elements in the IRF patterns. The analysis suggests that the third stage can create an ad-hoc co-constructive classroom interaction and provide L2 learners with various learning opportunities.

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.

The present qualitative research sought to investigate EFL teacher educators’ experiences and attitudes toward critical thinking and its role in teacher professional development. The adopted design was a case study and the theoretical framework was the theory of transformative learning (Mezirow, 1978). For the data collection purpose, 30 EFL teacher educators participated in in-depth interviews. The  whole procedure of  the data collection was audiotaped for further reference in data analysis. The interviews were transcribed to familiarize with the data and the transcribed interviews were member checked with the participants. The collected data were analyzed through reflective thematic analysis. The data analyzed paved the way for generating three themes: cognition, metacognition , and personal growth/self attainment . The findings of the study comprise a number of implicatios for both theory and practice. One aspect of our contribution is that the notion of critical thinking can be conceived as more than cognitive and metacognitive one; it should be conceptualized as possessing both facets as well as other possible subsets. Beyond that, we suggest that critical thinking should be conjectured as being both a process and a product.

The measurement of test-taking strategies and practices, mostly studied through qualitative methods, has been an important aspect of language testing and assessment research. The current study examines the test-taking strategies of International English Language Testing System (IELTS) test-takers and reports the process of designing and validating an IELTS test-taking strategy questionnaire. To achieve this aim, a questionnaire with 62 items was developed and piloted on 534 IELTS test-takers. To ensure its validity, the questionnaire results were analyzed through Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analyses (EFA and CFA). The final 49-item instrument with eight factors, “test-management (TM)” and “test-wiseness (TW)” strategies in each skill, had adequate psychometric properties. The findings revealed positive correlations between TM and TW strategies, representing strong correlations between Reading TM and Listening TM, Reading TW and Listening TW, and Listening TM and Speaking TM. The developed questionnaire can serve as a diagnostic tool to monitor test-takers’ performance and strategies, mainly in high-stakes tests like IELTS.