درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

A good lesson plan will most probably end up in effective teaching performance. Despite the positive role of planning lessons in the success of any teaching and learning experience, it has not been fully addressed in the Iranian EFL context, and many teachers consider it an impractical or challenging performance. Hence, the present survey study aimed at investigating what EFL teachers conceived of lesson planning and implementation. Furthermore, the role of a series of demographic variables, namely, gender, teaching experience, and educational degree, were also considered. The study participants included 120 EFL teachers working at universities, schools, and language institutes of Sirjan, Iran. The instrument used for data collection was a closed-ended questionnaire developed by Ramaila and Ramnarain (2014). The results from descriptive as well as inferential statistics, including the independent samples t -test, one-way ANOVA, and one-sample t-test, demonstrated the EFL teachers' moderate willingness toward lesson plans in general and its different aspects in particular. It was also revealed that the participants’ perceptions of lesson planning did not differ, considering their demographic features. Educational administrators and authorities can utilize the obtained outcomes of the present study to take sound measures in this regard leading to better achievement of all language learners and even all learners in general.  

The present study investigated the effects of motivational scaffolding on self-determination and learning achievement of field-dependent/independent Iranian EFL learners. To this purpose, quantitative data were elicited and analyzed from 60 intermediate learners who participated in the study as experimental and control groups. The Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) was administered to categorize the learner participants into field-dependent and field-independent learners. Then, the scaffold design proposed by Belland et al. was presented to the experimental group, while the control group got all tests and questionnaires with no scaffolding. At the end of 8 training sessions, a self-determination questionnaire was administered to both groups, and then a post-test was applied to examine the impact of scaffolding on learners’ achievement. The statistical analysis of the elicited data showed that the learners’ interaction within motivational scaffolding improved their self-determination and their learning achievement. The findings of the study have implications for teachers and learners in educational settings and help them to detect possible factors affecting EFL learners’ language performance.

This study focused on the effects dynamic form of text-based vocational vocabulary glosses: Dynamic glosses are a series of incremental mediations intended to support students in identifying correct word definitions. After running a pre-test (TOFEL i), 34 ESP learners in medical university were chosen to participate in the study, 17 students randomly assigned to the treatment group and 17 randomly assigned to the control group. Participants in treatment and control conditions received three short ESP texts with many vocational vocabularies using the computers in the language lab and the Adobe Connect application. As the participants in the dynamic gloss condition faced unknown vocational vocabulary items in the passages, the teacher provided the learners with a set of mediations from the most implicit to the most explicit prompts, and the learners tried to identify the correct meaning of the word. In the non-dynamic gloss condition, the learners were given the L1 definition for the target words. The post-test results indicated that the treatment group meaningfully outperformed the control group.    

The study of second language learners' engagement with language learning tasks has become an enchanting line of research since several studies in general education and second language literature have proved its significant effects on learners' ultimate educational success. However, there are several niches in the literature which have not been occupied yet. One of these niches, addressed in this study, is the examination of the effect of computer-mediated condition on second language learners' emotional and social engagement with speaking tasks. Using a repeated-measures design, 40 intermediate language learners performed computer-mediated and face-to-face speaking tasks in a counterbalanced fashion. A questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were employed to collect the required data to respond to the questions. The results showed that learners were more emotionally and socially engaged with the computer-mediated speaking tasks. It was also revealed that low-intermediate learners’ use of social engagement indicators was significantly higher in the computer-mediated condition; however, the change in the condition did not significantly affect the quantity of social engagement indicators provided by high-intermediate ones. The findings also indicated that different engagement dimensions are interconnected, and the change in one of them can affect the other ones.  

This study is an attempt to find the realization of visual literacy in Iranian high school English textbooks. To this purpose, the density and number of the tags in the three volumes of the senior high school English textbooks were qualitatively investigated. The results showed that Book 1 emphasizes the Affective/Perceptual aspect of the visuals, whereas Book 3 puts more emphasis on Critical/Ideological aspect of the visuals. Furthermore, it was found that as grades of the books advance, the density and number of the tags decrease. The results based on Callow’s (2005) dichotomy also indicated that as the grade of the English textbooks advances, the visual literacy moves from the receptive aspect to more productive one. It can be inferred that in developing high school English textbooks, there seems to be no association between the visuals and the corresponding tags despite the variety of the visuals.  

Language learners' test performance is affected by individual attributes that are not part of test takers’ language ability (Bachman, 1990). The identification of such factors and the study of their association/impact with/on EFL learners' test performance has been a real test validity concern for language testing researchers (Bachman, 1990, 2004). This study was designed to explore the relation of a number of cognitive and psychological attributes and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' test performance. To this end, two hundred male (100) and female (100) Iranian intermediate EFL learners selected through convenience sampling procedure took Goal-orientation Scale, Test Preparation and Test-taking Strategy Scale, and Examination Stress Scale and a sample Test of English as a Foreign Language Junior Standard (TOEFL Junior). Regression analyses of the questionnaires and the TOEFL test results demonstrated that mastery goal orientation, performance goal orientation, test-taking strategy and test anxiety all correlated with EFL learners' test performance; however, test taking strategy was the strong cognitive predictor and performance goal orientation was the strongest psychological predictor of the EFL learners' test performance. The results seem to indicate that in addition to previously identified factors like test anxiety and test taking strategies some factors like performance and mastery goal orientations which were once deemed as construct irrelevant factors in EFL learners' test performance need to be added to the battery of personal attributes that are influential factors in this regard.

This study aims to determine whether the perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness can significantly predict the students’ intention to use video conferencing applications in an online classroom. This study utilized a descriptive predictive quantitative research design. This study used the survey questionnaires adopted from the study of Salloum et al. (2019). The researchers conducted an online survey using Google form for over a month. Out of 153 target respondents, 130 responded to the survey questionnaire. Linear regression was initiated using JASP 0.16.0.0. The findings revealed that the two variables perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness can both significantly predict the students’ intention to use video conferencing applications in an online classroom. The results further showed that the perceived ease of use can better predict the students’ intention to use video conferencing applications in an online classroom as compared to perceived usefulness. The findings imply that video conferencing applications used in the teaching and learning process should be user-friendly and pedagogically relevant to support students’ desire to use video conferencing applications.

This study attempted to investigate the impact of creative literacy activities on the reading motivation and reading comprehension of young Iranian learners in the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and EFL contexts. A sequential explanatory mixed-methods study was designed in which 65 Iranian female young learners in two different English language settings took part. In the quantitative phase, both groups received the reading comprehension and reading motivation scale as both pre and post-tests. Likewise, the experimental groups received training in terms of creative literacy activities. In the qualitative phase, the learners from both groups were interviewed to explore their reading motivation. Findings revealed that the learners in the CLIL context outperformed their counterparts in the EFL context both in reading and reading motivation. The findings of the study also proved that learners in the CLIL context had a more positive attitude toward L2 reading. Teachers’ reflective journals further revealed the superiority of the CLIL context over the EFL context in developing young learners’ (YLs) L2 reading and reading motivation. The findings have implications for the L2 teachers and curriculum designers when deciding the type of activities and the amount of L2 exposure for young learners.

The current study was an attempt to investigate the effectiveness of the flipped classroom model on the fluency of foreign language learners' speech. To this end, fifty undergraduate English Language and Literature students, who had enrolled in a "Listening & Speaking" course, participated in this study. Data were collected through a one-group pre-posttest design and semi-structured interviews. Two raters assessed the learners' four oral presentations. The Praat software and one-way repeated measure ANOVA were used for data analysis. The results showed that the flipped classroom model could significantly develop students' oral fluency. Meanwhile, the findings of the semi-structured interviews indicated that the students were delighted with this approach. From their perspectives, the cooperation and collaboration between students and teachers were undeniable. They also believed that their self-confidence increased. Correspondingly, the results suggest that the language instructors and stakeholders at any level can benefit from this approach, i.e., flipped classroom model to shift the instruction to a practical learner-centered approach.

There is growing agreement among researchers on the advantages of using automated feedback programs (AFPs), but most of the previous studies have evaluated more well-known AFPs like Grammarly, Ginger, etc. in English writing classes. None of the previous studies on AFPs evaluated the effectiveness of and users' perception of InstaText. Thus, this study was aimed at examining the effects of InstaText on improving the language quality (i.e., grammar, spelling, and style) of Persian-English freelance translators using InstaText for editing their English translations of Persian academic papers, which are considered technical translations. In addition, it was conducted to investigate how the said users perceived this InstaText. This quantitative study was conducted in two phases: a one-group pretest-posttest phase, where the effect of using InstaText on improving the language quality of translated technical texts was examined with 75 participants; and a survey phase, where the participants' perception toward InstaText was measured using Usefulness, Satisfaction, and Ease of Use (USE) questionnaire. InstaText did not help the participants make significant progress in grammar and spelling, but its effect on improving their style was significant. Further, the participants perceived the tool as intuitive, user-friendly, efficient, time-saving, and satisfactory.

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.