درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The aim of this study was fourfold: (1) to investigate the effect of literature-based activities on the accuracy of Iranian Engineering students’ writing (2) to examine the effect of literature-based activities on the accuracy of their WhatsApp assisted writing (3) to determine whether their emotional intelligence (EI) increases through literature-based activities in a WhatsApp assisted setting and (4) to survey the effect of literature-based activities and the produced emotional intelligence on the complexity and lexical diversity of students’ WhatsApp assisted writing. In phase I, as students went through literature-based activities, no significant differences of accuracy were found; despite the fact that the mean difference and standard deviation scores were indicative of effective treatment, literature-based activities. In phase II, the results obtained from the analytic procedures of literature-based activities on the accuracy of students’ WhatsApp assisted writing showed that the experimental group showed higher accuracy of writing. In phase III, the result of emotional intelligence improvement was more remarkable in the WhatsApp assisted writing. Additionally, the WhatsApp assisted written productions were significantly more diverse in using lexis, t-units and clauses but not other parameters of complexity. The results have some implications for teachers and researchers in the ESP setting. 

The present study intends to study Iranian EFL teachers’ attitude towards post-method pedagogy (PMP) and its implementation in private language institutes. The participants of this study were 80 male and female EFL teachers from different private institutes in two cities of Mazandaran province in Iran. For the purpose of data collection, this study applied a Likert type questionnaire. In order to analyze it, minimum, maximum, mean, and standard deviation were calculated, then different tests including Friedman test, Wilcoxon test, Pearson Correlation, and Independent T-test were utilized. Considering the findings of the study, one cannot conclude that teachers have a positive attitude toward post-method principles. In fact, the findings show uncertainty about the actual emergence of PMP principles in EFL institutes in Iran and the fact that there is a long distance to the actual realization of principles of Particularity , Practicality, and Possibility , especially the last one. Furthermore, there is a significant relationship between respondent teachers’ familiarity of some principles of PMP and their experience, field of study, and education degree.

The present research probed the sociocultural challenging variables which may affect EFL learners’ identity formation during their language studies in an Iranian context. A thorough analysis of the literature encompassing EFL teachers’ opinions and EFL coursebook analyses was performed to develop a comprehensive view of the recognized sociocultural domains and variables. Furthermore, an open-ended questionnaire was designed and distributed among 50 adolescent male and female EFL learners at the age range of 13-21 years (M=16) as Erickson’s identity confusion stage to identify the newest sociocultural challenging variables in the present Iranian context. The result of the research led to compilation of a Sociocultural Variables Inventory presenting an extended range of variables operating in the context of Iranian EFL learners’ identity formation. The inventory could act as a basis for research in the fields of TEFL, sociolinguistics, cultural studies, and further interdisciplinary research.

There has been a burgeoning of research in teacher, peer, and self-assessment in terms of reliability and validity, the use of rubrics, the implementation of these kinds of assessments in different academic settings, the effect of demographic variables in these assessments, and the benefits of these assessments. However, the effect of these assessments on subsequent learning has rarely been explored. To fill that void, this study set out to examine the effects of these kinds of assessments on subsequent learning as evidenced by students’ final exam scores. Two intact classes were chosen and teacher, peer, and self-assessments were employed in a general English class. The scores achieved on the students’ oral presentations exhibited a statistically significant correlation between the teacher awarded scores and those on the final examination of general English proficiency as a course. Peer awarded scores could also predict final exam scores, though not as good as teacher awarded ones. Self-assessment failed to correlate significantly with final exam scores and teacher/peer assessments. The reasons for the findings are discussed further in the paper.

Educators often employ various training techniques to reduce raters’ subjectivity. Negotiation is a technique which can assist novice raters to co-construct a shared understanding of the writing assessment when rating collaboratively. There is little research, however, on rating behaviors of novice raters while employing negotiation techniques and the effect of negotiation on their understanding of writing and rubric features. This study uses a qualitative method to keep track of 11 novice raters’ scoring behaviors and examine their textual foci during three phases of scoring through an analytic rubric: pre-negotiation, negotiation, and post-negotiation. To ensure triangulation, multiple sources of data including raters’ verbal protocols of independent scoring during the initial and final phases, audio-recorded interactions in the negotiation phase, and semi-structured interviews were gathered and analyzed. Results indicated that in their initial independent rating, raters mostly scored based on their understanding of the writing skill and the writing features that were important to them, but negotiation sessions aided them to refine their judgments and attend to a wider array of textual features more consistently and in line with the rubric, thereby expanding their understanding of the rubric categories. Post-negotiation ratings were also more similar to negotiation than prenegotiation ratings, meaning that the raters attended to more features of the rubric for scoring. The findings may have implications for rater training. In the absence of expert raters to train novice raters, negotiation can be considered a useful technique to improve raters’ understanding of the rubric features.

This mixed-methods study aimed at investigating the effects of a gadget-based Internet multimedia extensive reading program on promoting language proficiency. In so doing, a pretest-posttest design was applied in the quantitative phase to comparatively analyze outcomes of three classes of college-level EFL learners (two experimental groups and one control, each including 30 university students) on how much they improved in their receptive proficiency, before and after the general English language course they were taking. The first group took the General English course along with a multimedia-based Internet extensive reading program as the study’s treatment, and the second group took a linear text (traditional) extensive reading program with their English course. The posttest scores showed that students in experimental group 1 (extensive reading using multimedia texts) outperformed both experimental group 2 (extensive reading using linear texts) and the control group. Furthermore, experimental group 2 had higher scores in comparison to the control group. As for the qualitative phase, results of the follow-up interviews and open-ended questionnaires also indicated that the learners liked, and would prefer to substitute traditional reading programs by gadget-based multimedia ones. EFL teachers may be most interested in outcomes of this study since insights may be gained regarding the extent to which Internet-based reading should enter language courses.

The main priority for university translation educators is to improve the quality and outcomes of translation courses. To achieve such a goal, the instructors are required to integrate learners' needs, identified with the help of a needs survey, into syllabus content. Accordingly, the present study was conducted to identify the Iranian English majors' difficulties in translating English texts since once a problem is identified, exploring the best pedagogical solutions would follow. The aim was accomplished through qualitative descriptive research conducted at Islamic Azad University, Shiraz Branch tracing the errors committed by the English majors in their exam papers in academic years 2016-2019. Following the model proposed by Miremadi (2008), the syntactic and lexical problems were identified in the exam papers collected during six semesters. Moreover, three more categories were added to the list as the data analysis moved forward: culture problems, stylistic problems, and miscellaneous errors with detailed subdivisions. What appeared to be worthy of attention in the results was the students' weakness in text and sentence segmentation to find the function of the components to approach textual meaning, resulting from the students' poor English language proficiency. The results also revealed the students' poor topical knowledge as well as the lack of knowledge of translation techniques and strategies.

In order to establish the why of noticing, it is imperative to empirically explore the factors that potentially mediate noticing. This study aimed to explore two factors that are believed to affect noticing: the complexity of target structures and learners’ second language (L2) proficiency level. English relative clauses (RCs) were selected as the target structures, and Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis (AHH) was taken as the measure of the complexity of the RCs. A sample of 113 freshmen English language majors were selected as the participants of the study. A test of English RCs was developed as the placement test, and Key English Test (KET) was used to classify the participants into three groups of High (N=38), Mid (N=37), and Low (N=38) L2 proficiency level. Note-taking was used as the measure of noticing. After administering the RC test and the proficiency test, the participants were given a number of authentic reading texts containing instances of RCs and were required to take notes during reading activity. The non-parametric Friedman’s test demonstrated that the complexity of RCs positively affected the participants’ noticing while the non-parametric ANCOVA indicated that the participants’ L2 proficiency level had no significant effect on noticing. The findings of this study can be helpful to both teachers and material developers in providing learners with optimal conditions for noticing linguistic forms, which in turn, could facilitate L2 learning.

This study compares three integrated tasks of the TOEFL iBT speaking subtest in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency. To this end, a group of TOEFL iBT Iranian candidates took a simulated TOEFL iBT some days prior to their real exam. The collected oral responses were first transcribed and then quantified using software such as ‘Syllable Counter’ and ‘Coh-Metrix3’ for fluency and complexity, respectively. For accuracy, however, the responses were tallied manually. The results revealed the responses to the three speaking tasks were significantly different in terms of fluency. The difference in the accuracy index also turned significant, though the pairwise comparisons showed some inconsistencies. As for the selected complexity measures, lexical diversity, the mean number of modifiers per NP, and latent semantic analysis all showed significant differences between tasks 2 and 3 on the one hand and task 4 on the other. Left-embeddedness, however, revealed no significant difference among the three tasks. The results may support the influential role of prompting texts in such integrated speaking tasks