درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present study examined the effect of multimedia glosses on foreign language listening comprehension. To this end, 94 male students studying at Rasa English Institute in Tehran were selected for the treatment. The participants consisted of three groups, and each group was randomly assigned to one of the following treatment conditions: textual, pictorial, and textual-pictorial glossing. They were given a vocabulary pre-test before the treatment. The purpose of this test was to exclude the words which were already familiar to the participants from the posttests. Meanwhile, a listening comprehension post-test was administered at the end of the treatment period. To investigate the effect of multimedia glosses on listening comprehension, the data obtained from the listening comprehension post-test were analyzed using one-way ANOVA. The result showed that textual-pictorial glosses had a significant effect on listening comprehension. The findings of this study may have implications for language learners, teachers, researchers, and materials developers.

Formulaic sequences (FSs) are among the most commonly discussed and well-documented effective factors in oral fluency both in L1 and L2. The present study aims to investigate the effect of teaching a set of 140 FSs on Iranian EFL learners' oral fluency. The relationship between the use of FSs and different measures of oral fluency is also studied empirically. Forty-eight intermediate EFL learners took part in the study. The participants were randomly assigned into two experimental groups and one control group. One of the experimental groups was taught the FSs with spaced retrievals. The other experimental group was also taught the FSs but with non-spaced retrievals. The control group was taught no FSs. The posttest was conducted one week after the treatment. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and other statistical procedures were used for analyzing the data. The results indicated that spaced productive retrieval of the FSs after their explicit and holistic teaching, helped the learners to have longer mean length of runs. The present findings have important implications for solving students' problems in speaking the second language. Therefore, the significance of spaced retrieval of FSs in language teaching and learning should not be neglected.

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.

The present study sought to explore the relationship between Iranian EFL teachers' brain dominance, teaching experience and their teaching style. The study population consisted of all EFL teachers of high schools in Shiraz holding a B.A degree, with the sample consisting of 100 participants recruited through convenience sampling. The study employed a descriptive correlational design. To collect data, a 40 Item-Teaching Style Survey, a 15 Item- Brain Dominance Questionnaire, and a 14 Item-Teaching Experience Scale were used. The data was presented in mean, standard deviation, graphs, and tables. Pearson correlation coefficient and multiple regression were used to test the research hypotheses. The results showed that there was a significant relationship between EFL teachers’ brain dominance, teaching experience and their teaching style. It was also found that EFL teachers’ brain dominance was a grater predictor of their teaching style than their teaching experience was. The results have several practical implications. The recommendations made include whole brain teaching and addressing the cognitive needs of EFL teachers.

Learners can collaborate with each other to achieve a lesson objective. In the collaboration, they can provide each other with guidance in order to identify mistakes and improve their achievements. With the rise of online instructions, this small-scale exploratory study aimed to see how proficient learners guided their less proficient classmates in correcting the grammatical accuracy of sentences. Twenty three learners who were taking a blended-learning grammar class were assigned to post brief essays on Edmodo and the more able learners were instructed to help their weaker classmates find and correct the errors in their essays. A total of 18 essays and 15 lines of comments were generated in their online interactions. A coding was done to identify the moves of the learners as they gave and received peer corrections. The results indicated that the more able learners made seven types of moves for guiding their classmates, with only three sequences incorporating a relatively complete scaffolding moves. The weak learners, however, hardly responded to their more proficient classmates. Reluctance to prolong the discussion in online setting and the difficulties in dealing with detailed grammatical items in such setting may have been responsible for this low rate of responses.

Kumaravadivelue’s (2012) language teacher education for a global society known as KARDS has gathered little momentum in the context of Iran due to scarcity of studies on it. To fill this gap, the present research investigated Iranian EFL teachers’ perceptions of KARDS with regard to variables including teaching context, gender, and teaching experience. To this end, a KARDS questionnaire was designed, constructed, and validated by the researchers, and the results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirmed the validity of the questionnaire. Later, it was administered to 400 English teachers in Tehran. Then, 20 participants volunteered for follow-up interviews, and their verbatim interview transcripts were content analyzed. The results of descriptive statistics and MANOVA indicated that teachers’ perceptions were positive for the majority of items except theorization, observation of colleagues’ classes, and needs analysis done by outsiders, and there were significant differences in teachers’ perceptions of KARDS with regard to their teaching context, gender, and teaching experience. Also, the qualitative investigation of teachers’ perceptions confirmed the findings of the quantitative part.

In an effort to examine EFL students’ and teachers’ perceptions about the role of implementing flipped teaching in the university context, a mixed-method research approach was employed. To this end, 80 male and female Iranian advanced EFL learners majoring in English translation, literature, and English teaching and 204 Iranian EFL instructors were selected. They answered the flipped teaching questionnaires, then ten percent of the participants (8 students and 20 teachers) volunteered for follow-up qualitative data collection procedures (i.e., the interview) to let the researchers produce more profound responses to the related concepts of the study. Then, the data collected from the questionnaires were coded and analyzed. Also, the qualitative analysis of the research was done using the interview transcripts to support the quantitative analysis results of the research. It included content analysis requiring the examination of the participations' interviews transcripts. The findings of the quantitative part revealed that a majority of students held positive perceptions about engagement, effectiveness, attitudes, and positive affect through flipped instruction constructs in the flipped teaching class. University instructors also had an inclination towards implementing flipped teaching on the whole for the constructs named language improvement, attitudes about flipped instruction, better education through flipped instruction, and difficulty of implementing flipped instruction. The qualitative investigation confirmed the previously-stated results to a great extent in that the EFL students and instructors generally preferred employing flipped teaching and they had positive perceptions about the role of this approach.

EAP courses for various disciplines are designed as a conduit between academic research and practical applications (Paltridge & Starfield, 2013, p. 175). On the other hand, one of the main missions of ESP practitioners is to prepare learners for realities of English on the job (Paltridge & Starfield, 2013, p. 185). This study aimed to provide a profile of target professional English needs of Iranian BA students of Business and Economics and to explore what real requirements are expected from them at work in future. To this end, perceptions of two groups of stakeholders, namely, human resource managers (N = 30) and employed graduated students (hereafter called “staff”, N = 600) chosen through stratified sampling from various established business sectors were asked through triangulation of instruments using questionnaire, interview, and self and peer-assessment. The results suggested that while all four main English skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) have been considered important in profession, the employers favored ‘productive’ English skills noticeably more. Moreover, the present professional English level of the staff, as evaluated by their managers, was turned out to have a long distance from the voiced expectations by themselves and the managers. The findings suggested the need for serious reconsideration of EAP courses in Business and Economics regarding the teaching methodology, content and practices in light of future occupational demands of the students and tying different dimensions of such courses to the requirements of corresponding workplaces. Implications of the study for improving the aforementioned EAP courses are also presented.

This research was conducted to measure Persian EFL students’s degree of willingness to write in English. To reach the goal, semi-structured interviews were conducted, deriving inspiration from earlier works of McCrosky and Baer (1985), MacIntyre, Dornyei, Clement, and Noels (1998), and Yashima (2002) on willingness to communicate. The participants of the study were 29 individuals comprising 23 university students from different majors and 6 writing experts with academic statuses varying from BA holders in TEFL to university professors in applied linguistics. They were interviewed in two separate layers via employing the Delphi technique. Content analysis was conducted on the interviews and the components were extracted; the WTW questionnaire was then designed and developed for the first time and was validated via conducting factor analysis and was then administered to 257 university and IELTS students. The final version of the questionnaire included 38 items after having been factor analyzed. The results indicated that there are four factors underlying the construct of willingness to write, which are interlinguaprofession, cognition, involvement, and technology. The findings of the study can bring considerable benefits to EFL students to recognize the influential factors on their degree of willingness to write (WTW) and try to boost the facilitating factors to become more autonomous learners. Academic EFL/ESL writing teachers can enhance their students’ writing ability via embarking upon new strategies through which they can make learners more willing to write by promoting learners’ involvement and engagement in writing, as one of the findings of this study.

Considering the fact that engagement with political economy is central to any fully rounded analysis of language and language-related issues in the neoliberal-stricken world today, and that applied linguistics has ignored the role of political economy (Block, Gray, & Holborow, 2012), for the first time, this study investigated the representations of neoliberal ideologies in the Interchange Third Edition Series. To this end, both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted based on Du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay, and Negus’s (1997) model of ‘Cultural Circuit’, especially their concept of ‘Representational Repertoires’. Furthermore, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1996) ‘visual grammar’ was used for the analysis of the artwork. The results of the quantitative analysis revealed that more than 50% of the total number of units in each of the textbooks featured neoliberal-related content. Moreover, the results of the qualitative analysis confirmed Du Gay et al.’s (1997) argument that textbooks are not only curriculum artifacts but also cultural artifacts or communicative acts which serve to make English mean in particular ways - in this case the hegemonic culture of neoliberalism. As a result, it is necessary for EFL/ESL teachers and students to collaboratively develop counter-hegemonic discourses through critical thinking and dialogic interrogations of neoliberal discourses.

Teacher resilience, as a recent issue of concern, enables teachers to bounce back and thrive rather than just survived in the face of challenging circumstances. Although self-efficacy has been prompted to enhance resilience, there is little empirical research to investigate the relationship. To address this gap, the present study is an attempt to examine the connection between EFL teachers’ resilience and self-efficacy. In doing so, ninety-two EFL teachers completed Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale (TSES) and resilience scale (RISC). The findings showed the positive impact of different dimensions of self-efficacy on resilience. The results of the correlational analysis indicated that all three self-efficacy subscales had a significant positive relationship with teachers’ resilience. The results of multiple regression also suggested that, save for classroom management, two other subscales of efficacy as efficacy for student engagement and efficacy for instructional strategies were the good predictors of teacher resilience. In line with these findings, some suggestions for further research are provided and pedagogical implications are proposed.

Language assessment literacy (LAL), mainly defined as knowledge and skills of language assessment, in the last two decades, has started to receive the attention it deserves. As one of the significant findings, based on a plethora of research, many second language (L2) teachers have been indicated to be professionally incompetent in terms of LAL. To investigate the status of LAL among Iranian English teachers, the present study was conducted. Three hundred and nine English teachers participated in answering a questionnaire. Besides, 24 teachers were interviewed based on a semi-structured interview. Both qualitative and quantitative data analysis and interpretation techniques were employed to find answers to the research questions which sought to investigate the features of language assessment literacy in language teachers' perceptions. The findings indicated that, overall, LAL is of concern to Iranian L2 (English) teachers. However, they also agree that their current level of both knowledge and practice in terms of LAL is not ideal. Furthermore, it was found that, as the teachers perceive it, assessment promotes learning and teaching; the nature of teacher-learner relationships affects evaluation; and, testing and assessment are seen as challenging notions due to their mathematical concepts and statistics. The findings will contribute to a more profound perception of LAL and better planning and executing the programs for L2 teachers regarding the issue.

This study explored both teachers’ and learners’ perceptions of teachers’ pedagogic strategies which may engender willingness to communicate (WTC) in an English as a foreign language class and the difference between their perceptions to detect how convergent or possibly how divergent these are. The project used a convenience sample of 300 students taking an intermediate English course and their teachers (N=60) in several English Language Institutes in Tabriz, Iran. The instruments included a Likert scale questionnaire on teachers’ pedagogic strategies and learners’ WTC completed by both teachers and learners. Based on the data collected from the questionnaires, it was revealed that the teachers and learners agreed on the role of teachers’ wait time in learners’ WTC but not on the other strategies such as motivating strategies, error correction strategies, and teachers’ congruence. The findings of the study have important implications for teachers in terms of reconsidering their pedagogic strategies to play their facilitating roles in engendering students’ WTC in the class. The results also have the implications for EFL teacher education in the new era of communication.

Despite widespread interest and research among applied linguists to explore metadiscourse use, very little is known of how metadiscourse resources have evolved over time in response to the historically developing practices of academic communities. Motivated by such an ambition, the current research drew on a corpus of 874315 words taken from three leading journals of applied linguistics in order to trace the diachronic evolution of stance markers in methodology section of research articles from 1996 to 2016. Hyland’s (2005b) model of metadiscourse was adopted for the analysis of the selected corpus. The data were explored using concordance software AntConc (Anthony, 2011). Moreover, a Chi-Square statistical measure was run to determine statistical significances. The analysis revealed a significant decline in the overall frequency of stance markers in methodology section of RAs. Interestingly, this decrease was entirely due to the overall decline in the use of self-mentions. Approaching interactional dimension of academic writing from such a diachronic perspective, it might be argued that the very selective use of stance markers by academic writers over time means metadiscourse does not operate in vacuum and is sensitive to changes within disciplines and their academic practices.