درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This study aimed at investigating shades of identity in TEFL textbooks. Most identity studies have focused on authors as knowledge producers. They have neglected authors' roles in constructing identity. Further, few scholars have considered disciplinary specific textbooks in their analyses of identity. Trying to bridge these gaps, we applied Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics to investigate identity through the lens of sociocultural theory. The study corpus consisted of nine commonly used textbooks on language testing, language teaching, and linguistics in Iranian EFL context. The textual analysis revealed various levels of self and other-regulation mediated by interpersonal, textual, and ideational metafunctions. These findings suggested that studying their disciplinary specific texts, students of TEFL may develop not only their academic knowledge but also their ideological positions and academic voices.

Motivated by the concept of Communicative Language Ability and the eminence of the IELTS exam, this study intended to scrutinize the representation of functional knowledge (FK) and socio-linguistic knowledge (SK) as sub-components of pragmatic knowledge in the writing performances of both tasks of the online General IELTS-practice resources across three band scores. This quantitative inter-scores/intra-tasks and inter-tasks investigation aimed to reveal firstly whether the writers of three band scores 7, 8, and 9 differed from each other in their FK and SK level, and secondly whether the tasks differed in activating them. This study adopted a taxonomy of five illocutionary acts and 20 register features to investigate representation of FK and SK in a well-established corpus of 180 writing performances through both manual analysis and Multidimensional Analysis Tagger software. While the results of statistical analyses revealed no FK differences between the bands in task one (T1), T2’s higher bands involved more functional features because of the expression of a diverse range of psychological states, no speaker’s involvement, and less commitment to a future course of actions. Furthermore, socio-linguistically, band 9 scripts encompassed more logical relations, but conversational and spoken style in T1 and more integration, less simplified structures and ego-involvement in T2. The inter-task analyses uncovered T1’s greater activation of FK through self-mentions, others involvement, emotion, and intention expression. Nevertheless, when it came to SK register features, T2 overdid in both spoken and written genre elements except in persuasion, writers’ involvement, mental acts expression, and interactive discourse creation.

This study investigated teachers’ views toward computer technology in teaching English pronunciation. In order to select teachers for the semi-structured interview, the researcher used a questionnaire and distributed it to 25 teachers from two Islamic Azad Universities of Guilan, Iran. The researcher chose 15 of them based on their answers to the questionnaire. Then a qualitative method design was used. It consisted of semi-structured interview questions with a sample of 15 teachers chosen from two Azad Universities. Data were collected and analyzed. Qualitative data were analyzed according to the process of reducing data, constructing theme, and drawing conclusions from the data. The findings showed teachers’ interest in using computer technology because it provided them with enjoyable and interactive environment, helped them obtain accurate pronunciation, and improved the quality of their pronunciation instruction. The findings also revealed that using computer technology raised teachers’ confidence and motivation toward it because it had a high potential that changed their instruction. Moreover, the findings indicated that teachers had enough knowledge of computer technology that helped them teach pronunciation effectively. In addition, the findings represented that using computer technology was not a threat to the traditional methods but it brought about better results than these methods.

Web-quests are internet-based technology applications in which groups of students follow a specific set of steps toward the completion of a final project on a specific subject or a multi-disciplinary subject. The present study aimed to investigate the impacts of using web-quests on learning vocabulary by Iranian pre-university students. The sample of the study consisted of 72 students assigned into two groups. One of the groups represented the control group, and included 23 students; the other group represented the experimental group and comprised 49 students. The two groups were chosen from a population of pre-university students in Chadegan, Isfahan, Iran. The web-quest strategy was used in teaching the experimental group, while the traditional method was used with the control group in the second term of the school year 2015-2016. An Oxford Placement Test (OPT), a vocabulary pretest, a vocabulary posttest, and an attitude questionnaire were the data elicitation tools employed in this study. The collected data were analyzed using independent-samples t test, which was used to determine the existence of possible significant differences between the groups both before and after the instruction. The results indicated that there were statistically significant differences between both groups in favor of the experimental group. The conclusion, thus, could be that the students in the experimental group, who used the web-quest resources for learning vocabulary, performed significantly better than the students in the control group, who learnt vocabulary through traditional method of learning vocabulary. Finally, questionnaire data analyzed via one-sample t test indicated that the experimental group learners had a positive attitude towards the treatment they experienced in the experiment.