درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have tremendously affected different aspects of education and have shifted the traditional face-to-face approaches to online learning. As a non-innovative mode of learning, online teaching and learning have created a new cultural ambiance since teachers and students have to change shortly. The present study draws upon the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework combining teaching, social, and cognitive presences to explore students’ online learning experiences. It aims to assess the interrelationship among presences of CoI and find out which presence is a major factor influencing cognitive presence. A total of 207 university students participated in this study. Data was collected using the Community of Inquiry Survey Instrument and quantitatively analyzed through Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) and descriptive statistics.The obtained results indicated that teaching, social, and cognitive presences are correlated, and social presence has a significant impact on students’ learning process. This has a wider implication for online teachers to create more activities and motivate the students to communicate and participate openly in social interaction.  

This study intended to investigate critical thinking-based teaching strategies EFL teachers of Iranian high schools integrate into their teaching. To this purpose, the inter-relationship between the teachers' frequency of use of critical thinking-based teaching strategies and their teaching experience, their attendance at critical thinking in-service training courses, and their higher university degree were explored through a survey questionnaire. To analyze the collected data, means, frequencies, standard deviations, percentages, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), correlation coefficient, and five-point Likert scale were utilized. The obtained results showed that teaching experience was negatively correlated with the frequency of strategy use, and that no significant relationship was found between the frequency of strategy use and teachers’ higher university degree. The results further showed a significant relationship between the frequency of strategy use and critical thinking in-service training courses attended by teachers. The findings of this study imply that critical thinking should be reinforced in Iranian education system as well as in high school teaching schedule.

This study aimed at examining prospective EFL teachers' views about quality of online English language teaching and Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) and the related skills. To this end, the viewpoints of 100 graduate students of TEFL (M = 23, F = 77) at Iran University of Science and Technology were investigated via administering two questionnaires, namely online teacher quality and frames of knowledge and skills, along with two-open ended questions to gain more insight into online teacher quality and their knowledge frames. Internet-based survey method was employed to administer the questionnaires and collect the required data. The quantitative and qualitative data obtained were analyzed through descriptive statistics and thematic analysis, respectively. With regard to online teacher quality, the results revealed that pre-service teachers agreed that an online teacher should be an organized mediator, communicator, and problem solver as well as being highly passionate, energetic, and competent in teaching. The results also indicated that having content and pedagogical knowledge, clearly organizing and structuring content, time management skills, using appropriate resources, and providing feedback and multiple opportunities for communication were the most significant knowledge types required of an online language teacher. Considering online teaching skills, effective online communication skills, effective content delivery, technological skills, and effective evaluation and assessment were the most frequent skills suggested for online language teachers. The findings of this study could give more insights into designing knowledge-based and skills-based professional development programs for prospective teachers to enhance the quality of their online teaching.

This research reports on how EFL teachers feel about their education based on knowing, analyzing, recognizing, doing, and seeing (KARDS) modular model. The researcher employed convenient sampling to choose 15 teachers. Due to the closure of schools in the pandemic era and the online nature of courses, English teachers are only available online or in meetings at the university. A KARDS questionnaire was used to record the teachers’ views. The questionnaire was researcher-made and it was either handed in the meetings or sent via e-mail or other routes. The data gathered showed that though the English teachers had the knowledge necessary about their jobs, most of them lacked the necessary insight required in terms of the 5 modules of education in L2 teaching. The data seem to imply that ELT education programs in Iran are mostly oriented towards teacher training, rather than teacher education.

The negotiated syllabus, also known as a learner-centered and process-oriented syllabus, was introduced as an alternative to a pre-determined syllabus a couple of decades ago. The review of the related studies shows the number of studies in the use of negotiated syllabus in English language teaching is scanty. This study aimed at delving into the impacts of the negotiated syllabus on undergraduate students’ reading comprehension, oral production, and the participants’ perspectives about the syllabus. A mixed-methods research design was employed. Data were collected through researcher-developed tests and an interview checklist. The quantitative section analyzed through independent samples-tests (p=0.05) verified that the negotiated syllabus had a significant effect on the experimental mean scores regarding reading comprehension and oral ability production. In addition, results of the qualitative phase indicated that the use of negotiated syllabus, despite some learner, teacher, and institute-related constraints, has some pedagogical advantages. In light of the results, teachers are recommended to minimize the limitations and implement the negotiated syllabus in teaching English programs to optimize the language learners’ motivation and language achievement.  

As Farhangian Universities play a crucial role in educating soon-to-be teachers, the program being developed for students of this university needs to be meticulously developed in order to fulfill the crucial role of teacher training centers. Researchers of this phenomenological study tried to evaluate curriculum specified for TEFL students in Farhangian Universities by the implementation of SWOT analysis. Seven professors of Farhangian University in Mazandaran participated in this study to speak for their perspectives regarding the curriculum’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. They took part in interview conducted by researchers and their comments were transcribed to be segmented and codified in later sections. The findings of this study clearly demonstrated that this program suffers more from weaknesses and there are opportunities which might act as compensation for weaknesses and threats. The significant weakness of this curriculum that was elaborated by participants was misplacement of courses without any observation of necessary content knowledge and pre-requisites. Specification of courses exclusively for teaching was mentioned as one of the important strengths of this university. Participants believed that the first opportunity to be made use of, is to maintain connection with other teacher training centers in Iran and around the world.  

Through a descriptive Ex Post Facto research design, the relationship between teacher reflection and classroom management, the predictive power of teacher reflection components regarding classroom management, and classroom management strategies used by high and low reflective teachers were examined. To this end, 113 EFL teachers completed the Attitudes and Beliefs on Classroom Control (ABCC) Inventory (Martin et al., 1998b) and teacher reflection inventory (Akbari et al., 2010). The results of the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient showed that there was a significant positive relationship between teachers’ reflection and their sense of classroom management. Moreover, a multiple regression was run whose findings revealed that practical and critical components of reflection are the best predictors of teachers’ sense of classroom management. Twenty teachers were also interviewed and the thematic analysis of the interview showed that high reflective teachers used different kinds of management strategies, for their students’ social, emotional, and behavioral difficulties using proper pedagogical planning and techniques of teachers’ teaching style, expertise, and experience in better assessment of the students in the classroom.

Language learners receive different types of corrective feedback during the process of second language acquisition. Recast, as an approach to corrective feedback, is one of the most-frequently error correction techniques in classroom contexts. A plethora of research has addressed recast; however, the present study focused on comparing learners’ grammar achievement via oral and writing modalities through two perspectives, cognitive and ecological, who received recast. One hundred and twenty language learners, all first-year college students at Islamic Azad University and Applied Science University in Tehran participated in this study. They were assigned to four groups. The participants in all groups were exposed to different instructional programs based on the cognitive and ecological perspectives to language learning orally or in writing, and all learners received recast orally. Results obtained by a pretest and a posttest indicated that all groups made progress in their grammar achievement, while there was a statistically significant difference between the groups in the posttest. The participants in the ecological group had higher gains of grammatical structures than those in the cognitive group. However, data analysis revealed that there was no statistically significant difference between two oral and writing groups in their grammar achievement.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the probable effects of E-Mind Maps on the prevailing Language Learning Strategy Choices of adolescent versus adult Iranian EFL learners (LLSC). Besides, their preferred strategies were investigated across each dominant LLSC for some volunteer participants through structured interviews. According to a mixed-method design, 76 available Iranian adolescent and adult EFL learners, both male and female, were randomly divided into four equal groups of experimental and control ones. Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) was conducted for all participants in the pre-and post-intervention phases, followed by a structured interview in just the post-intervention phase in the qualitative phase. The intervention presented the teaching content through E-Mind Maps vs. the conventional way of teaching for 20 sessions. The data were analyzed using descriptive and Chi-Square statistics. The results confirmed that using E-Mind Maps shifted the dominant LLSC of adolescent and adult EFL learners to memory and cognitive strategies. Moreover, preferred strategies across each dominant LLSC were discussed in detail for both groups. The conclusion can provide critical implications for English language teaching, learning, and educational technology in using E-Mind Maps as an effective strategy in EFL classrooms.

The well-established affiliation of metadiscourse research tradition to the philosophy of ESP raises some inevitable expectations on how much and how well the concept has been geared to meet the practical necessities of academic writing pedagogy. In light of such an expectation, a corpus of 35 academic writing coursebooks published during the last three decades was evaluated in terms of the possible realizations of key resources of interaction in pedagogical tasks. Due to its theoretical rigor and analytically operationalized nature, Hyland’s model of metadiscourse (2005a) was taken as the guiding framework for the current evaluation. The quantitative findings emerging from the analysis of the corpus did not sound sufficiently promising, suggesting that those theoretical developments have not yet been ideally translated into pedagogical designs; however, the rich range of resources identified in the tasks (i.e., the 55 categories emerging from the evaluation of the corpus) suggest that the rigorous tradition of research in metadiscourse has contributed to the effective operationalization of the concept for pedagogical objectives. It has been argued that through the effective introduction of the concept of metadiscourse into pedagogical designs and its appropriate operationalization, novice participants of academic/scientific discourse communities would be enabled to redefine the nature of academic communication and get rid of a large number of misconceptions which have become fossilized through long years of the dominance of positivistic thinking.