درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The notion of teacher professional identity has become a regular fixture in numerous theoretical and empirical studies in both mainstream and L2 teacher education. Consequently, a number of scales have been designed and developed to quantify this construct. To be sure, the extant instruments are general with regard to both context and subject matter, and this line of inquiry has not addressed the quantification of the concept in the ELT profession. The present study was, therefore, an attempt to provide a (re)conceptualization of L2 teachers’ professional identity through exploring its underlying components. To this end, an initial 61-item, self-assessment questionnaire was developed using a comprehensive review of the related literature and experts’ opinion. The trial scale was then administered to a sample of 676 ELT teachers. Results of exploratory factor analysis reduced the instrument to 42 items, leading to a six-factor model which indicated that L2 teacher identity includes: researching and developing one’s own practice; language awareness; institutional and collective practice; engaging learners as whole persons; appraising one’s teacher self; and sociocultural and critical practice. Confirmatory factor analysis substantiated the resultant six-factor model as a robust and valid tool for measuring ELT teachers’ professional identity.

Although global English Language Teaching (ELT) coursebooks have been subject to numerous (critical) analyses, the changes occurring to their contents over different editions have received scarce attention. In this study, the researchers examined the transformations over different editions of Interchange series (level 2) regarding some selected aspects of their textual contents. Seeking experienced English teachers’ views of the global coursebooks’ transformations over the past decade was another aim of the study. The analysis and comparison of the included topics and titles, characters, sites and contexts in Interchange series as well as interviews with 12 English teachers revealed that the content-based changes of different editions of this coursebook are superficial and cosmetic-like and despite the claims for globality, fallacies such as real-life-ness, representation and globality are still evident. We hope the findings of the study would aid curriculum and policy makers, institute managers, and language teachers to reconsider the functioning and value of current global ELT coursebooks.

The use of storytelling on students’ first language literacy and development were extended to foreign/second language learning, and a large number of researchers interested in the field attempted to use storytelling and story reading strategies in teaching oral language skills to foreign/second language learners. Despite the existence of a number of studies on the impact of storytelling on English language skills, the number of studies on the impact of storytelling and story reading approaches on pre- intermediate EFL learners’ oral language production and comprehension seems to be scanty. To do so, a quasi- experimental study was employed. Ninety Iranian language learners, from 6 intact classes (each consisting of 15), were divided to three sub-groups: storytelling, story reading and conventional groups. To one group, stories were told, one group only read the stories, and the third group received no stories. The data were collected through researcher developed oral language production and comprehension tests. One-way-ANOVA test and three independent samples-tests based on Bonferroni test were employed to analyze the data and locate the sources of the differences. Findings revealed that storytelling outperformed story reading groups on both production and comprehension tests. Story reading group outperformed the conventional group. It can be concluded telling and reading stories are effective techniques for improving EFL learners’ oral language production and recognition.

Applying metacognitive strategies leads to better listening comprehension and optimal use of learners’ other cognitive skills. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the metacognitive strategies that non-Iranian Persian learners employ to comprehend oral texts and whether gender and mother tongue have any effect on it. This research is a field study in which after calculating the item reliability of the questionnaire, data were collected quantitatively through Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ) developed by Vandergrift, Mareschal, and Tafaghodtari (2006). One hundred nineteen adult Persian learners from eight countries participated in this study. Data analysis indicated that non-Iranian Persian learners use problem-solving, direct attention, planning-evaluation, personal knowledge, and mental translation strategies respectively. Furthermore, the findings showed that male Persian learners employ metacognitive strategies more than female learners, even though this difference was not very significant, and that mother tongue has no effect on the use of these strategies. Research findings will help Persian language teachers to take into consideration each group of learners’ preferences and extent of their use, as well as variables such as gender and nationality.

The present study aims at scrutinizing the inference complexity level (henceforth ICL) of test items of the Iranian State University TEFL Ph.D. entrance exam (ISUTPEE) from 2010 to 2017 through the lens of Kintsch's construction-integration theory (C-I) (Kintsch, 1988, 1998). Though there is ample research on inferencing in the field of reading comprehension, the existing literature reveals a serious gap in relation to inferencing complexity of test items in high-stakes exams that exert profound effects on the academic achievements of the individuals. Inferencing is examined in this study to explore the ICL of the test items of the Special Knowledge Test (SKT) according to three levels of memory representations of Kintsch's model: the surface model, the textbase, and the situation model. To this end, the test items for eight consecutive years of the ISUTPEE were examined in relation to the three distinct kinds of mental representations. To ensure the reliability of coding by the researchers, two other specialist coders assessed the ICL of 33% of the items. The intraclass correlation among the three sets of codes was 0.91. The results of the study showed that a large number of questions, accounting for more than 80% of the items, merely activate the surface and the textbase model of information representations in memory. Furthermore, the ICL for each of the four parts of SKT was examined. This analytical study carries a stark warning regarding a deficiency of systematic attention to ICL in the development of test items.

Some universities in Iran have recently witnessed a shift in admission criteria from university admission test performance towards high school records. This sudden change seems to be unwarranted since the predictive power of high school records has not been explored. To fill in this gap, this study aims at showcasing the predictive validity of high school records for undergraduate students of English language and literature. To this end, a random sample of undergraduate students studying at Shahrood University of Technology were selected as the participants, the predictor variables were operationally defined as the participants’ grade point average (GPA) in three school subjects including English, Persian and Arabic languages along with their overall high school GPA, and the explained variable was operationalized as the participants’ overall GPA for the first academic year. The results of Pearson correlation revealed a significant but very low correlation between the variables of interest. Moreover, the results of multiple regression analysis revealed that none of the predictor variables well predicts academic success in English language and literature. Although the results of this study are case-specific, they have clear implications for policy makers and interested researchers nationwide.

Washback or backwash, used similarly, has been defined as the impact of testing on curriculum design, teaching practice, and learning behaviors. Iranian PhD candidates’ performance on this exam is required to pursue PhD study; therefore, degrees of washback both at the micro and macro levels are at stake. Despite the importance of this exam for the candidates, it seems that studies on washback and specifically washback effect of EPT on Iranian PhD candidates’ learning materials has not been given adequate attention in Iran. Given this, the present study attempts to examine the washback effect of EPT on Iranian PhD candidates’ learning materials. Based on sequential design, two phases of data collection were conducted with a two-week interval. In the first phase, attitude questionnaire was administered to 200 Iranian PhD candidates at Islamic Azad University, Isfahan (Khorasgan) branch. In the second phase of the study, 20 Iranian PhD candidates were interviewed. Finally, the collected data from both the questionnaires and the interviews were analyzed via quantitative and descriptive analysis, respectively. The results of the study revealed both positive and negative washback impacts on learning materials. The findings of the study have practical implications for language teachers in general, and EFL language teachers, syllabus designers, and material developers in particular.

There is scarce systematic research on the role of genres and their associated discourse features in Information Structure and its syntactic representations in Persian. The current descriptive, corpus-based study, therefore, aimed to investigate three different genres of Persian spoken language; that is, political, scientific and daily conversation, in terms of their Information Structure as realized through four syntactic devices of clefting, pseudo-clefting, passive and preposing. To this purpose, 1000 different utterances related to each of the mentioned genres, were extracted from the multi-media archive of IRNA (Iranian News Agency) website and daily conversations of the researchers’ family members and friends, based on Lambrecht’s theoretical framework in modeling the Information Structure. The collected data were then transcribed, the syntactic devices were identified, and descriptive statistics were used to see how the above syntactic devices are represented in each genre type. The results revealed that the devices are represented differently in the three genres of political, scientific, and daily conversations. This finding may be of interest to linguists and language theoreticians.

L’utilisation efficace des techniques narratives ont abouti à la création des œuvres réussies dans le domaine de la littérature énigmatique. Parmi les grands écrivains de ce domaine, Tahar Ben Jelloun a une place incontestable. Cet article, d’une manière descriptive-analytique, cherche à identifier l’influence de l’utilisation des techniques narratives dans un roman intitulé l’Enfant de sable de cet écrivain afin de déchiffrer le roman en s’appuyant sur des théories de Gérard Genette. À cet égard, après la présentation et l’explication de la théorie narrative de Genette d’après trois niveaux instance, mode et temps, le roman mentionné a été profondément analysé. Il s’est entièrement éloigné de la narration linéaire des faits qu’ils ont été racontés avec la rapidité et l’ellipse ; la majorité des scènes s’illustre en résumé et la fréquence itérative est fréquente. Et en raison de la présence de plusieurs narrateurs, il y a de différents points de vue qui augmentent l’attraction du roman. Tout au long du roman, l’anachronie, la polyphonie, la polymodalité, l’anisochronie, la diachronie et la poly-personnalité, sont apparentes.

L’histoire de la poésie négro-africaine moderne, telle que tracée depuis la Négritude, était fixée sur des clichés idéologiques et esthétiques connus et ressassés depuis longtemps par les auteurs comme par la critique. Les thèmes de la liberté, de la dénonciation du racisme, des spoliations diverses, de la quête d’identité entre autres, rencontraient généralement ce besoin de ressourcement dans les traditions orales négro-africaines. D’une façon ou d’une autre, cette esthétique orale s’est presqu’imposée au fil du temps à ces auteurs, mais aussi aux épigones qui vont leurs succéder. Contre toute attente cependant, il va subsister des styles, des formes de discours et des fonds idéologiques qui semblent s’en démarquer et que nous découvrons de plus en plus comme un courant spécifique traversant certes plusieurs stades historiques, mais qui restent homogènes dans leur construction du fait poétique. L’exemple d’ Au tréfonds de mon âme d’Okaré Kouadio est si typique, qu’il nous permettra d’aborder les liens fondateurs et leurs principes d’écriture qui, visiblement, les démarquent des modèles poétiques connus dans l’environnement poétique négro-africain.

Dans les méthodologies qui précédaient la perspective actionnelle, en particulier l’approche communicative, il n’y avait que quatre compétences : la compréhension orale/écrite et la production orale/écrite. C’est à partir de la perspective actionnelle et plus particulièrement de la rédaction du CECRL en 2001 que la compétence de la production orale se divise en deux parties : celle de la production orale « en interaction » et celle de la production orale « en continu ». Dans cet article notre problématique principale est de savoir comment appliquer les stratégies d’apprentissage métacognitives afin d’améliorer la compétence de la production orale en continu chez les apprenants iraniens. Pour pouvoir appliquer les stratégies métacognitives au moment de la production orale en continu, nous avons enseigné pendant une séquence didactique de deux mois (3 heures par semaine) aux 15 apprenants au niveau A2 les stratégies métacognitives et nous leur avons proposé différentes tâches et activités qui exigeaient chacune la mobilisation des stratégies métacognitives. Les résultats de cette étude montrent que l'enseignement et la pratique de stratégies métacognitives peuvent aider à renforcer cette compétence des apprenants du FLE lors de la production orale en continu.

Although most EFL learners are equipped with a fair command of general English knowledge, they lack the sufficient proficiency required to communicate their thoughts and ideas fluently and accurately. This study was conducted to explore the impact of task-based language teaching (TBLT) on the development of EFL learners’ productive skills. The participants of this study were 25 undergraduate students majoring in English Language and Literature at a State University who had enrolled in a course entitled “Listening and Speaking (I).” The teaching method utilized for this course included three tasks (listening, writing, and speaking), and each task included three phases (pre-task, whilst-task, and post-task). For the purpose of data analysis, the researcher analyzed students’ four oral presentations and four writing assignments quantitatively and qualitatively. Furthermore, an attitude questionnaire was administered and a semi-structured interview was conducted to elicit the participants’ attitudes regarding (TBLT). The findings revealed that all the students could significantly improve their productive skills. Correspondingly, the results of the questionnaire and semi-structured interviews revealed participants’ positive attitudes regarding (TBLT). Students realized that developing their speaking and writing skills was a complex process, and through practicing, they could overcome their problems and enhance their fluency and accuracy.