درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The quality of students’ relationships with their peers plays an important role in developing their academic achievement. The present study aimed at constructing an accurate, reliable, and valid instrument that could assess the EFL students’ perceptions of peer support. The instrument includes different subscales, namely Informational Support, Emotional Support, Instrumental Support, Feedback, and Companionship Support. The Peer Support Questionnaire was administered to 212 Iranian undergraduate EFL students studying at two public universities in Iran. An exploratory and a confirmatory factor analysis were conducted, and the overall factor loading estimates indicated a quite satisfactory level of convergent validity for the developed Questionnaire. Both the degree of factor loadings and the construct validity test supported the convergent validity of peer support factors and their related items. The findings demonstrated that PSQ could be a valid and reliable instrument for measuring the concept of peer support in both academic and educational settings.

This study investigated the effect of Narrow Reading (NR) on learning mid-frequency words. Vocabulary Size Test (VST) designed by Nation and Beglar (2007) was administered as the first pre-test to 196 students, from among whom 91 students whose vocabulary size ranged between 2100- 3500-word families, , became the target of this study and were randomly classified into four groups. Then another pretest administered was a modified version of Wesche and Paribakht’s Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS) which assessed how well they knew twenty vocabularies derived from the expository and narrative texts. After thirty sessions for direct instruction, VKS was repeated immediately as a posttest to assess vocabulary learning while a month later, VKS was taken as a delayed posttest to assess vocabulary retention. To address research questions, a mixed design factorial ANOVA was conducted. The findings revealed that while the theme was fixed, reading expository texts rather than narrative ones led to the growth in vocabulary knowledge. In addition, the group that read narratives forgot most of the mid-frequency words in the retention phase. As opposed to multi-author texts, reading texts written by one author resulted in a better vocabulary achievement in both learning and retention phases. It was also revealed that there was no interaction between genre and author. In other words, the author was as influential in learning mid-frequency words among expository texts as it was in narrative ones. Finally, it was concluded that NR has a positive effect on learning mid-frequency words.

پژوهش حاضر به بررسی خطاهای فارسی زبانانی که انگلیسی زبان خارجی آنها است در تولید عبارات موصولی زبان انگلیسی پرداخته است. باوجود آنکه در زبان انگلیسی، استفاده از ساخت پرسشی در اغلب عبارات موصولی بدون هسته مجاز نیست، فارسی زبانان به وفور از این ساختار در جملات انگلیسی خود استفاده میکنند. طی این پژوهش، ریشه های احتمالی این خطا شناسایی و تحلیل شدند و نهایتا فرضیه نشانداری تمایزبخش که قدرت بیشتری در توضیح این خطا داشت به عنوان چارچوب نظری این پژوهش انتخاب شد. پیکره شفاهی و کتبی این پژوهش طی دو سال از منابع متعدد و از 137 مشارک خانم و آقا به دست آمد. داده ها از گویه هایی که به طور طبیعی، نه با هدف این پژوهش، بیان شده بودند جمع آوری شد و شامل 126 عبارت موصولی خطادار بود که 85 عبارت (67.46%) بدون هسته معمولی، 25 عبارت (19.84%) هسته دار و 16 عبارت (12.69%) بدون هسته آزاد بودند. بررسی دقیق تر داده ها منجر به شناسایی تمایز نظام مند بین خطاها در دو نوع عبارت موصولی اصلی (بدون هسته در جایگاه فاعل یا مفعول) و دو نوع عبارت موصولی فرعی (بدون هسته در جایگاه فاعل و دارای فعل بودن ) گردید. این وسعت کارکرد عبارات موصولی در زبان انگلیسی نسبت به فارسی، می تواند موجب نشانداری این ساختار برای فارسی زبانان شود. به نظر می رسد این نوع نشانداری که ناظر بر گستره کاربرد جملات پرسشی و خبری در جایگاه عبارات موصولی بدون هسته است بیش از نشانداری از حیث تفاوت در تعداد واژگانی که در فارسی و انگلیسی برای یک کارکرد واحد وجود دارد، می تواند علت بروز این نوع خطا را توضیح دهد. پژوهش حاضر، بر ضرورت بررسی زبانشناسانه سایر ابعاد خطاهای نظام مند مشابه، همکاری متخصصان زبانشناسی و آموزش زبان دوم/خارجی در شناسایی و رفع مشکلات یادگیری، و پژوهش های بیشتر برای ارایه راه حل های آموزشی برای چنین مشکلاتی تاکید می نماید.

The current research examined the use of lexical bundles in the result sections of research papers by Iranian non-native writers in the field of applied linguistics. The WordSmith Software was applied to identify lexical bundles. In addition, the two analytical frameworks Biber et al. (2004) and Ruiying and Allison (2003) were used to categorize the bundles with regard to their structural features and their moves and steps. Moreover, with the aid of concordance, the identified clusters were analyzed and categorized according to their communicative functions. The results of the current research showed that Iranian writers relied heavily on the use of specific formulaic bundles to perform the communicative functions associated with the moves and steps. The findings also revealed that four moves out of six moves were mostly used by Iranian authors. Moreover, the researchers found that the extensive range of formulaic clusters used to demonstrate Move 2, Reporting results, the least bundles occurred in Move 4, Summarizing results, and also no clusters were used in Move 5, Evaluating the study along with Move 6, Deductions from the research by Iranian writers. The findings of this study boost the awareness of formulaic sequences usage for novice writers in particular discourse and communicative function.

: Corrective Feedback (CF) provision on performance involves calling attention to learners' erroneous utterances, which stimulates classroom language learning. Despite widespread research in this area, a controversy still exists as to the time of CF in communicative tasks especially when learners' task engagement is targeted. Employing 60 intermediate-level Iranian learners, a four-week study examined the effects of immediate versus delayed CF types on oral engagement, grammar gain as well as on Complexity, Accuracy and Fluency (CAF) in the context of a dictogloss task. The statistical analysis showed that despite statistically significant improvements in the case of Grammaticality Judgement Test (GJT) from the pre-test to the post-test, no statistically significant difference was found between the two groups with regard to their grammar gain, complexity, accuracy, fluency, as well as on their social and cognitive engagement. However, results in the case of behavioral and emotional engagement revealed that there were statistically significant differences between the two groups of immediate and delayed CFs. The findings of the present study call for more flexibility and confidence on the part of the teachers in providing either immediate or delayed CF whenever appropriate and without being concerned about the adverse effects of feedback

New approaches and methods to language learning and teaching have drawn the attention of many researchers. This study aimed at investigating the role of Iranian EFL learners’ attitudes towards the value components of the Partnership Approach (PA) on motivating their active engagement in the learning process. A descriptive research method (survey study) was used, and 72 male and female Iranian EFL students whose ages ranged from 18 to 26 were randomly selected to participate in the study. They were asked to respond to a five-point Likert-scale questionnaire addressing the objectives of the study, and then 30 of the participants were randomly interviewed to reveal the possible consonance with the questionnaire outcomes. The study was conducted at Islamic Azad University (IAU), Najafabad Branch. The findings indicated that although both male and female participants showed significantly positive attitudes towards the value components of the PA, except for the inclusivity value, female participants held significantly higher positive attitudes. The highest motivational value from both male and female participants’ point of view was for the challenge value component. However, reciprocity and inclusivity were the value components with the lowest motivational values from the male and female participants’ point of view, respectively. Focusing on the importance of the psychological factors in education, the findings of the study may encourage both education policy-makers and practitioners in the field to think more critically, and make more reasonable decisions for their policy and practice.

This study set out to check the addressing behavior within men’s and women’s talk in the written conversations in English language textbook series titled ‘New Interchange book’ by Richards, Hull and Proctor, (1998) from Cambridge University Press. In line with this aim, the present researchers initially prepared descriptive tables for both formal and informal contexts in three theme categories (Social, Cultural & Economic) vis a vis four case appropriations (men*men, men*women, women*men, women*women). The distributions of interlocutors were coded through content analysis techniques. The major findings indicated that the highest percentage of detected address terms belonged to pronouns (67.7%). The proportions for gender appropriations between interlocutors for this address term showed that the case condition with women to men (52.3%) and men to women (36.4%) had the highest rates as compared with other cases. Then, in the final stage, the datasets were scrutinized in terms of theories on gender disparity in the instructional materials. This paper has some pedagogical implications in terms of addressing term inequality as mapped on gender status within ELT books, which might indirectly change the balance against full and rich contexts for effective learning to occur.

Language teacher immunity has recently attracted the attention of the scholars interested in teacher psychology. Following the previous line of research in teacher psychology, the present study explored the immunity types among 260 Iranian EFL teachers working in schools and language institutes. Drawing on Hiver’s (2017) categorization, this study found that the participants were classified into productively and maladaptively immunized teachers through cluster analysis. It was also found that gender played a significant role, and female participants were more productively immunized than men. Regarding the role of teaching experience, it was found that EFL teachers’ immunity fluctuated in the late stages of their practice to a more fossilized, negative one. Regarding age differences, the results also suggested different immunity types among the participants of different age groups. The results implied that teacher education programs should enhance EFL teachers’ understanding of language teacher immunity as an important factor in their effectiveness and well-being as well as students’ achievement.

This study focused on the pedagogical application of priming in an EFL context. Structural priming refers to the speakers’ tendency to produce the structure they encountered in recent discourse in subsequent production compared to an alternative form. Given the limited number of studies in the literature with a focus on the application of priming in L2 teaching and the problems that L2 learners face during speech production, the present study aimed at investigating whether the implication of priming leads to a more frequent oral and written production of the relative clause (RC) structure compared to adjectival modification of nouns (AN) in long- and short-terms as an instance of implicit learning. Participants consisted of 60 EFL female L2 learners, aged between 18-25 years old. Two experimental and 1 control groups were defined and 20 participants were allocated to each group. By applying a pretest, a treatment, an immediate posttest, a delayed posttest design, a picture description task, and a grammaticality judgment test (GJT), the data were gathered. Results of the descriptive and inferential analyses revealed that the implication of priming led to an improvement in the rate of the RC construction when the participants were involved in the written production of the L2, as compared to oral modality. Results are discussed based on structural complexity and procedures involved in L2 production. Theoretical and practical implications of the study are considered, too.

As a negative consequence of COVID 19, almost all students felt obliged to leave the universities and use electronic devices to learn. Some universities encouraged faculty members to use Electronic teaching as an alternative to traditional classrooms. Despite a large number of studies on different forms of electronic learning, the effectiveness of synchronous and asynchronous E-learning in teaching grammar to EFL learners has been neither investigated nor compared appropriately. Two intact  classes of undergraduate students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) from Farhangiyan university were selected. and each received the treatment through either synchronous or asynchronous E-learning activities. The same syllabus consisting of dependent Clauses, Appostive, infinitives, and gerunds were taught to the two groups. EFL learners’ knowledge of grammar was  measured by recognition and production tests.  The two groups’ scores were submitted to repeated measures ANOVA tests. The findings showed that both modes of E-learning greatly influenced the language learners’ knowledge of grammar as measured by recognition and production tests. Results also showed that the interaction between electronic modes and grammar recognition and production tests was statistically significant. Therefore, it could be concluded that E-learning learning is useful, synchronous learning is more effective for improving the language learners’ production, and asynchronous learning is effective for improving the skills and subskills which require reflection and comprehension.