درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Essay genres are often employed to assess learning at higher education. Students are sometimes required to write essay in examinations and assignments. The expectations of assessors in writing essays are students’ ability to present analytical and reasoned arguments and to engage with alternative viewpoints. In fact, in evaluating essays, assessors consider the extent to which a student is able to meet these expectations. However, students may have challenges meeting these expectations and instructors, particularly instructors in the discipline, may not be prepared to provide students with an explicit linguistic description of how these expectations are met. Thus, this study draws from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to scaffold students’ challenges in meeting the expectations of essay genre. In fact, it uses Dreyfus et al’s (2010) 3 x 3 linguistic toolkit to analyze essays written by postgraduate students in the department of English at one university in India. The 3 x 3 linguistic toolkit is used to zoom in student’s challenges in controlling the resources of SFL’s three metafunctions (ideational, interpersonal, and textual) at the level of whole text, paragraph, and sentence. After the analysis, the findings revealed that students face challenges controlling the resources of the three modes of meaning at all levels. These challenges include difficulties in grammar, lexical choices, punctuation, following expected organization, answering the question, the use of signposts to create a coherent text, and the use of engagement resources to develop a consistent argument. This study has implications for teaching and assessing academic writing.

The purpose of this study was to examine the accords and discords between English language teachers’ and students’ perceptions of teacher interpersonal behavior in four selected secondary schools in Ethiopia. The samples of the study were 48 English language teachers and their respective 420 students. In order to collect data, questionnaires were administered to both students and teachers. To analyze and interpret the data, a two-tailed independent sample t-test was used. Accordingly, the findings revealed that teachers rated themselves considerably higher for helpful/friendly, leadership, and strict behaviors and lower for uncertain, admonishing, student freedom/ responsibility and dissatisfied behaviors as compared to their students’ rating of them. However, no significant difference was found between the two bodies for understanding interpersonal behavior. Similarly, teachers notably felt they were highly in control of classroom communications and had more affiliation/ connection with the students in the process of communications than their students’ perceptions of them. Hence, there were much discords between English language teachers’ and students’ perceptions of teacher interpersonal behavior. Following the findings, some recommendations were forwarded.

This study intended to determine the way validity and reliability i.e., psychometric properties were reported in the Applied Linguistics research articles. The study also focused on the measurement methods applied to determine the validity and reliability of the scores derived from the tests and questionnaires in the empirical studies. The corpus of the study included 331 empirical studies derived from 733 research articles (RAs) published between 2005 and 2018 in three prominent Applied Linguistics journals – Applied Linguistics, Modern Language Journal, and TESOL Quarterly, The selected papers used test and/or questionnaire for data collection. Our analysis indicated that 77(20.98%) of the studies did not report validity and reliability measures, 82(22.35%) reported only reliability measures, 26(7.08%) reported only validity measures, and 182(49.59%) reported both the validity and reliability measures for the instruments. It was also found that content validity assessed through the pilot study had the highest frequency among validity evidences while internal consistency, mostly identified by Cronbach's alpha, was the most frequent reliability evidence.

Interlanguage pragmatics has attracted considerable attention in recent years. One strand of interlanguage pragmatics research includes studies comparing the effectiveness of implicit versus explicit teaching on the development of pragmatics. Many studies, although inconclusively, have shown the superior effect of explicit teaching of pragmatics, but few have focused on finding ways to improve the implicit teaching of pragmatics. The present study attempted to unfold the effect of collaborative dialogue on the quality of implicit teaching of request (head act and preparator). To this end, 28 participants (19 to 33 years old, intermediate) majoring in English (freshman and junior) were divided into two groups. The experimental group (n=14) had the opportunity to complete the tasks collaboratively and the control group (n=14) were not provided with any specific pragmatic instruction. The instructional procedure included four successive sessions of teaching request in situations where the sociological parameters were systematically varied. For the purpose of data collection, the classes were audio-recorded and a pretest-posttest design for discourse completion task (DCT) was adopted. For the purpose of data analysis, target request head acts and preparators were scored and also the audio recordings of classes were transcribed and the process of learning during treatment was checked in detail. The findings indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group in producing target preparators and head acts. And evidence of noticing the pragmatic forms namely noticing unnoticed forms, noticing the gap, and negotiation of form was observed during the collaborative task. This study suggests that teachers may need to provide learners with the opportunities for collaborative tasks along with input enhancement tasks in order to improve the pragmatic knowledge of the learners.