درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The current study investigated the impact of an interventionist model of dynamic assessment, using a repetitive process of pretest-teach-posttest design, on Iranian EFL learners’ reading comprehension and classroom engagement. To this end, 40 intermediate participants were selected through convenient sampling from among the English majors of a university in Kerman, Iran, and assigned to two control and experimental groups, each including 20 students. Then, during 4-month period, the experimental group was exposed to reading comprehension class, using an interventionist model of DA, while the control group did not receive ant dynamic assessment program. At the end of the treatment, the participants’ scores on the pretest and post-test were statistically compared. The obtained results revealed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group on the scales of reading comprehension skill. A change was also observed in the classroom engagement of the experimental group, but not for the control group. Indeed, the results showed that dynamic assessment can boost participants' performance in a practical and effective way, not only in terms of reading performance but also in terms of motivating more classroom engagement among EFL learners. This finding has implications for teachers to design more efficient courses which are the ultimate goal of education.  

This study examined the development of text complexity for the past 25 years of reading comprehension passages in the National Matriculation English Test (NMET) in China. Text complexity of 206 reading passages at lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels has been measured longitudinally and compared across the years. The natural language processing tools used in the study included TAALES, TAALED, TAASSC, and TAACO. To compare the differences across the years at various levels of text complexity, ANOVA and MANOVA tests were conducted. The results suggested that lexical level text complexity revealed the most evident changes throughout the years, lexical sophistication, density, and diversity levels of the most recent years of reading passages have increased remarkably compared to the early years. The syntactic level text complexity indicated a moderate elevation toward the recent years of reading passages. For the discourse level text complexity, regarding cohesion, insignificant fluctuation occurred throughout the years and the general trend was not necessarily increasing. Combined, the results indicated that text complexity of the reading comprehension passages in the NMET over the past 25 years had been steadily increasing by including more low frequency and academic vocabulary, diversifying vocabulary in the passages, and complicating sentence and grammatical structures. The results were further examined against the general curriculum standards and guidelines to analyze whether the changes were reflected in the policies. It showed that the exams required a much larger vocabulary size than the number indicated in the guidelines, suggestions for test designers and pedagogical practices were provided accordingly.

Intralingual translation is mainly motivated by the intention to modify the text to facilitate the listener's understanding. The present study attempts to examine the differences between VOA Special English and Regular English due to intralingual translation at the levels of phonology, lexicon, and syntax. To this end, 36 samples of passages of varying lengths dealing with academic discourse from non-modified (Regular English) and VOA’s modified (Special English) corpora were randomly selected and analyzed. The comparative analysis showed a significant difference between the modified and non-modified corpora in speech rate, syntax, and lexicon. Further investigation revealed that Special English was characterized by slower readings, increased pauses and tone units, more frequent and limited words, no idioms, repetitive and unmarked nominal clauses, and impersonal subjects in active voice structures. The findings of the study have implications for English teachers and material developers.

The main objective of this qualitative-quantitative content analysis study was to compare IELTS Academic and TOEFL iBT four modules in terms of the cognition and knowledge dimensions of Revised Bloom’s taxonomy. To this end, two authentic tests including all major modules of speaking, listening, reading, and writing in each domain, namely iBT TOEFL and IELTS Academic exams were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. These tests were randomly selected from the collection of authentic tests available in trustworthy resources. The contents of these tests were codified using a coding scheme developed by Razmjoo and Kazempourfard (2012). In this coding scheme, English alphabets and numbers were assigned to levels of cognition and knowledge, respectively. The results indicated that in general TOEFL iBT codes are more inclined toward the higher orders of thinking and knowledge and the codes are not noticeably divergent; while, the majority of the codes in the IELTS Academic test are skewed toward the lower codes of the BRT. This shows the higher stance of the TOEFL iBT test concerning the higher orders of thinking and knowledge in the BRT. A significant difference was also found between the TOEFL iBT and IELTS Academic tests concerning the highest and the lowest levels of BRT.

This study aimed to investigate the syntactic errors that the Iranian deaf and hearing-impaired (DHI) make in their L2 writings. To this purpose, 60 male and female Iranian DHI students with different social status were selected, through convenience sampling procedure, as participants from among the students of a deaf community in Bandar Abbas, Iran. Their general writing performance was assessed through a proficiency test (pre-test) before they received a six-week writing instruction, in which they were provided with model written utterances and common syntactic points such as sentence order, word order, subject/verb agreement, etc. At the end of the treatment, they were given two topics and asked to write short paragraphs (post-test). Then, different syntactic errors were spotted, analyzed and categorized based on Keshavarz’s linguistic taxonomy of errors. The obtained results indicated that the writing quality of the participants improved from pre-test to post-test. It was also found that majority of the participants committed more syntactic omission errors than syntactic addition errors and syntactic substitution errors. It was further found that syntactic errors in written language were not affected by the gender and social class of the participants. The findings of this study provide empirical evidence for teaching syntactic order to deaf and hearing-impaired students in order to enhance their L2 writing performance.

Supervisor’s feedback is both a naysaying and a puzzling concern that has always tormented academics in higher education. Particularly, written feedback on pre-final or final versions of a submitted doctoral dissertation is indisputably the most significant step toward granting a doctoral student supervisee the right to defend his/her research project. It also constitutes a rich source on how students are to academically go about writing their dissertation and even go public as they are supposed to produce one or two articles before their vivas. The present research explores the written comments provided by supervisors on Moroccan doctorate supervisees’ dissertations. It principally focuses on both overall and in-text comments and whether they serve as feed-back to take corrective actions for the errors made, feed-up to focus on strategies to attain the academic goal, or feed-forward to be proactive and avoid disturbances that might affect the quality of the final work. A total of 40 supervisees from the English department at FLLA, Ibn Tofail University belonging to Language and Society Research Laboratory participated in the study. Data were collected using an online questionnaire through available Google forms platform. The results revealed that the total majority of supervisees tended to get a mixture of written remarks with a central focus on the quantity rather than on form. This is therefore a plus as to the agreement as well as the variance of the Moroccan supervisors in the use of these evaluation criteria while evaluating their supervisees’ doctoral dissertations targeting different types of feedback with a huge focus of the cyclicity of their utilization.

Previous research has shown the differential effects of task-related prompts on syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, and lexical diversity when L2 learners use writing prompts to produce a piece of writing. However, the extent to which the freedom in the selection of prompts affects these linguistic facets in L2 argumentative essays is still unknown. The present study, therefore, was designed to investigate differences between syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, and lexical diversity in argumentative essays. Seventy-one upper-intermediate male and female Iranian English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) learners from Imam Khomeini International University in Qazvin and Safir Plus institute in Tehran participated in this study. Five-paragraph essays were used to collect data, and SPSS (version 25) was used to analyze the data. Results of multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) showed statistically significant differences between syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, and lexical diversity. Results from post-hoc analyses revealed statistically significant differences between lexical diversity and grammatical accuracy as well as lexical diversity and syntactic complexity, but no statistically significant differences were found between grammatical accuracy and syntactic complexity in argumentative essays.