درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

این پژوهش بر آن بود تا به بررسی موضوعی و روش پژوهش مقالات چاپ شده در هفت مجله زبانشناسی کاربردی از سال 1980 تا 2019 بپردازد. بر این اساس، 3491 مقاله از این هفت مجله استخراج شد. روش پژوهش این مقالات بر اساس سه روش پژوهش کیفی، کمی و تلفیقی دسته بنده شد. برای بررسی موضوعی این مقالات چارچوبی که شامل 10 موضوع از جمله آموزش، مدرسان، ارزشیابی، یادگیری، فراگیران، محتوا، هویت، آموزش زبان و تکنولوژی، انگلیسی برای اهداف ویژه و منظورشناسی و کلام بود مورد بررسی قرار گرفتند. نتایج نشان داد از سال 1980 تا 2000 روش کمی به صورت ویژه مورد استفاده قرار می گرفته است اما از 2000 تا 2019 روش پژوهش کیفی رشد داشته است. همچنین نتایج نشان داد که از سال 2010 تا 2019، پژوهشگران به استفاده از روش پژوهش تلفیقی علاقه مند شده اند. نتایج همچنین نشان داد که از سال 1980 تا 2019 بیشترین موضوعات درمورد یادگیری، فراگیران و محتوا و کمترین موضوعات هویت و انگلیسی با اهداف ویژه بوده است. نتایج این پژوهش می تواند به پژوهشگران حوزه زبانشناسی کاربردی و به طور ویژه پژوهشگران کم تجربه کمک کند تا دانش خود را درمورد آنچه تاکنون در حوزه زبانشناسی کاربردی انجام شده است تقویت کنند تا بهتر بتوانند تمرکز پژوهشی خود را ایجاد نمایند.

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.

Teachers need to know new applications for developing online materials and then they should become aware of different ways to present them to online audience. This study tries to help ELT teachers to overcome challenges and difficulties of vodcasting by recognizing their social and biological motives (Activity Theory), and using Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS). It can alter teachers’ negative attitudes towards online materials development via providing useful tools and techniques to become better producers of their knowledge to survive professionally. This QUAL-quan inquiry initiated with 10 University professors of Islamic Azad University-South Tehran Branch. All these participants answered ‘Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)’ questionnaire, ‘Personality Test and Job Satisfaction’, ‘Three-D Test’, and ‘Spatial Recognition Test’. The researcher conducted semi-structured interviews with those whose data were grounded and initiated from open coding, down to axial coding, and finalized with selective coding. Participants produced vodcasts as pre-test. Then, they received the treatments on an exclusively launched ‘MArt’ Telegram group in the form of the researcher-designed audios and videos and YouTube samples. As a post-test, each of the participants made another vodcast. Then, two experts who are ELT university lecturers evaluated the two sets of recorded data. Finally, all the interpretations and analyses were presented in different graphs and charts along with researcher’s interpretation based on theoretical frameworks. The results show that whether ELT teachers are capable of producing vodcasts or not. Besides, VTS help teachers to become much more visually literate and produce more successful vodcasts. Both treatments of the present study and the derived codes can be used in teacher education, and they can turn into a task-based digital or paper-based coursebooks benefiting M.A. TEFL students.

Meta-discourse markers are an inevitable part of oral proficiency which improve both the quality and comprehension of learners’ speech. While studies of oral meta-discourse have been conducted since the 1980s in a European or US context, they have remained relatively untouched in Iran. Therefore, this study aimed to seek the impact of both explicit and implicit teaching of formal meta-discourse markers on EFL learners’ oral proficiency. To this end, the quantitative data were collected from ninety upper-intermediate students at Shiraz University Language Center. Two groups went through an instruction for an eight-session treatment. However the experimental group ‘B’ (N=45) were instructed the formal meta-discourse markers implicitly, the target formal meta-discourse markers were taught to the experimental group ‘A’ (N=45) explicitly. To compare the participants’ performances, an SOPI (Simulated Oral Proficiency Interview) posttest was administered. The results revealed that the instruction of meta-discourse markers had a positive effect on the learners’ oral outcome. Moreover, the findings showed that learners who received explicit method of teaching formal meta-discourse markers could perform better in speaking than learners who received implicit instruction. The findings can have pedagogical implications for EFL educators and materials developers to enhance learners’ oral proficiency. The findings also provide important insight into the effect of teaching discourse markers and raising learners’ awareness through explicit instruction to make pupils produce more cohesive and coherent speech.

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.

Google Translate , a free multilingual machine translation service, developed by Google has attracted the attention of countless users due to its ease of use through modern means of mass communication, and has become the only translation tool in some areas. However, compared to human translation, these machine tools have not yet been able to deliver high-quality translations due to the complexity of translation process. Therefore, studying the modifications of machine translated texts is of great importance. Therefore, the current study aimed to explore the types of linguistic modifications of the texts translated from Persian into English through Google Translate. To this end, the abstracts of ten unpublished Persian literary articles intended to be submitted to Iranian journals were selected for the analysis. The selected abstracts were initially translated into English (target language) through Google Tra n slate from Persian (source language). To identify the kinds of changes needed to make them academically acceptable, the machine translated texts were all post edited. Then, the original Google translated texts and their post edited versions were compared to figure out the types of the applied modifications. The results of this qualitative study indicated that the linguistic post edition modification of the texts included tense, literal translation, redundancy, collocations, deletion of the main verb, word-choice and proper nouns.

Although grades are the most ubiquitous currency of educational measurement around the globe, their meaning, particularly in understudied settings as in Iran, is still shrouded in mystery. The purpose of this study was to investigate EFL teachers’ class grades by focusing on the less verbalized aspects of grading to see what a grade means. Five Iranian English language teachers working part-time in a private EFL institute were interviewed using the repertory grid interviewing technique, Kelly’s (1955) unique data collection instrument used extensively in personal construct theory (PCT). The results of the content analysis revealed that of the 92 elicited constructs, over 70% were categorized as non-academic, pointing to a heavy reliance on such criteria for grading, and consequently leading to the invalidity of assigned grades. Further, the results of principal component analysis (PCA) of each teacher’s elicited constructs endorsed hodgepodge grading by demonstrating single main components that accounted for the most variation in teacher grading and that comprised both academic and non-academic factors. However, this phenomenon was interpreted slightly differently when seen from the PCT perspective. Implications of this study for teacher professional development and teacher education programs are discussed.

Vocabulary and grammar are two significant components of English which learners often find challenging in their process of learning English as a foreign language (EFL). Therefore, finding the best way to teach grammar and vocabulary has always been a controversial issue among English teachers and researchers. The present study is an attempt to investigate the effect of dictogloss (DG) task, as one of the focus on form techniques, on EFL learners’ vocabulary versus grammar development. To this end, a quasi-experimental design was utilized to examine the effectiveness of the treatment. In this design, two classes were chosen, one as the experimental group (n=20) and the other as the control group (n=20). The participants were 40 female learners of English as a foreign language at intermediate level. In the experimental group the selected grammatical structures and vocabulary were taught using the DG technique, while in the control group the traditional method of teaching, present-practice-produce was used. The results gained from comparing pretest and posttest scores indicate that, although the experimental group outperformed the control group in learning vocabulary, there was no statistically significant difference between the experimental and control group regarding grammar scores. Therefore, it can be concluded that using DG task was more effective on vocabulary learning of learners than grammar development. The findings of this study will be of help for both English teachers and learners regarding finding the best method of teaching and learning English grammar and vocabulary.

: 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