درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Autonomous learning and social activity have excessively been the focus of interest in second language acquisition over the past decades. The present study aimed to explore how activity theory-as a branch of sociocultural theory focusing on social context-can promote Iranian EFL learners’ autonomy. To this end, fifty-six EFL students studying English translation at the Islamic Azad University, Tehran Central Branch, participated in the study. The participants were assigned to two groups, one experimental group and one control group. At the beginning of the semester, both groups took a language proficiency test to ensure their homogeneity. They also completed an autonomy questionnaire as the pre-test and post-test. The instruction in both groups was based on a five-step process of developing the academic writing skill, including prewriting, organizing, writing the first draft, revising and editing, and writing a new draft. However, only the experimental group received the instruction through an e-learning platform designed based on the six elements of activity theory-subjects, objects, mediating artifacts, rules, community, and division of labor-suitable for EFL writing classrooms. The results revealed that integrating activity theory to e-learning had a decisive role in enhancing the students’ learner autonomy. It is hoped that the findings raise both teachers and students’ awareness of implementing activity theory as a social learning framework to foster autonomous learning in EFL contexts.

Assessment has been taken to demonstrate that learning is aligned with external standards which is almost related to students’ goals in a curriculum in English language teaching and it plays an integral role in the success of language learning program that is following by so many EFL teachers. Consistency in scoring (mid-term and final exams) highly depends on the way of conducting paper assessment, validation of the process, reliability, experience of teachers, and different interpretation of assessors to make justified decision. Hence, the present study was an attempt to probe Iranian EFL learners’ perceptions toward paper assessment in mid-term and final exams in a language institute. To this end, a total of 100 participants (50 males and 50 females) between ages of 15 to 28 at intermediate level, were selected based on Nelson Proficiency Test. Data were collected through scores of two sequential semesters and a Likert scale questionnaire. The findings of this study indicated that there is a direct positive relation between learners’ viewpoints on paper assessment and their progress. Generally speaking, paper assessment in both formative and summative assessment would be a great progress among female and male English language learners.

This study investigated the impact of interaction and output modality on vocabulary learning and retention of EFL learners. To investigate the impact of Interaction, solitary (n =69) and collaborative (n =62) groups served as experimental and No Interaction No Output (n =26) as control group. To address the effect of modality, spoken (n =39) and written (n =31) modalities served as experimental and No output modality (n =26) as control group. The study was done in 8 weeks. The groups read passages with target words highlighted. Solitary and collaborative groups reconstructed the passages individually or in dyads. The spoken and written modality groups reconstructed them in the respective modality. Then, pretest, immediate, and delayed posttests were administered. The ANOVA results showed that the collaborative group outperformed the other groups and spoken modality outperformed the written modality group focusing on interaction and modality separately. The 2×2×2 ANOVA results showed significant main effects for time, interaction, and output modality. An ‘interaction’ effect was found between time and interaction, time and modality, and modality and Interaction. The ‘interaction’ between time, Interaction, and modality was insignificant. The findings have implications for language teachers, syllabus designers, and language testing experts.

The present study evaluated the learning objectives represented in the recent Iranian nation-wide ELT textbooks, i.e. Prospect and Vision series, and compared them to those in the internationally-published textbook of Four Corners. To this end, Bloom’s revised taxonomy of learning objectives was utilized as the analytical framework to scrutinize the tasks and exercises of the textbooks using a researcher-made coding scheme based on the taxonomy and investigate the extent to which they represent lower-order thinking skills (LOTS) (i.e. remembering, understanding, and applying) and higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) (i.e. analyzing, evaluating, and creating). Inter-coder reliability procedure was carried out to ensure the consistency of the scheme (Phi-coefficient =.89). Results of chi-square analysis revealed that Four Corners series dealt with LOTS and HOTS significantly more and above Prospect and Vision series. Furthermore, while Prospect and Vision series portrayed a completely imbalanced view towards LOTS and HOTS, Four Corners provided a somehow balanced representation in the tasks and exercises. The findings make the ELT teachers aware of the cognitive levels in the textbooks and recommend them to add supplementary materials when needed. Moreover, the results point to the significance of modifying the cognitive load of the Prospect and Vision series.

Interlanguage pragmatics, as an inseparable part of communicative competence, has been emphasized as an ultimate objective in language learning. This study explored the perceptions of Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) students regarding interlanguage pragmatics and the impact of textbooks tasks on shaping their pragmatic competence. To accomplish this objective, 137 senior EFL students from 12 state universities, ranging from 23 to 28 years, were selected based on convenience sampling procedures. The researcher utilized teachers' perception questionnaires, first used by Jandt (2011), to investigate the students' perceptions. A semi-structured interview as well as a document analysis of the university English textbooks were applied. Moreover, thematic analysis was carried out regarding the interview. Themes were identified for meaningful interpretations based on a document analysis to investigate if they were either linguistically or pragmatically oriented. Results from quantitative analysis revealed that university English students specified a perception that pragmatic knowledge is as imperative as linguistic knowledge. Besides, by analyzing the qualitative data via the participants’ interviews, the researcher extracted three codes, including the inadequacy or the quantity of pragmatic information, the suitability or the quality of pragmatic information, and also cross-cultural diversities. Moreover, students acknowledged that meta-pragmatic information is lacking in ELT textbooks, and the textbooks provide learners with more linguistic resources. The findings of the study suggest that university English teachers need to provide more pragmatic knowledge and design more pragmatically oriented tasks for students in their classroom teaching to help students become pragmatically competent.

From when the black box of authorial identity has been unpacked, the paucity of authorial identity model on the basis of a comprehensive theoretical framework addressed the need to establish a robust one (Cheung, Stupple, & Elander, 2015). The current study was comprised of three main phases including hypothesizing a model of authorial identity, developing and validating a questionnaire based on the model and finally testing the model based on the questionnaire data. The participants, including M.A. and PhD students, were 30 for initial piloting, 60 for reliability estimation, 140 for exploratory factor analysis, and 175 for confirmatory factor analysis. At first, drawing on Ivanič’s (1998) model of writer identity and Prior’s (2001) ways of classifying voice, reviewing the related literature, and consulting with a cadre of experts, a model of authorial identity was proposed. Secondly, a questionnaire was developed and validated based on the hypothesized model. The reliability of the questionnaire, estimated through Cronbach’s alpha, was 0.73. Following that, exploratory factor analysis identified four components, namely authorial voice and identity, authorial persona, authorial background, and authorial style. Ultimately, SEM was run using AMOS in the confirmatory factor analysis phase to test the model. The results of this multi-phase research are presented and discussed for underlining the key role of authorial identity in academic writing for both novice and professional academicians.

The present study was an attempt to provide a psycholinguistic account of cognitive processes underlying responding and questioning. It also strived to identify the potential differences between responding and questioning cognitive processes in Target Language Use Situation tasks. To accomplish the objectives, 65 Iranian general IELTS applicants from two foreign language learning institutes in Shiraz, with two different language proficiency levels (intermediate and advanced), were randomly selected. They were administered a normal responding and a reverse questioning IELTS oral tasks. Two seven-point Likert scale questionnaires were also used to measure the task difficulty and mental effort that the applicants perceived while doing the tasks. Additionally, the applicants’ recorded voices in tasks were transcribed and analyzed to assess the number of grammatical errors and pause lengths. The analysis of the numerical data through descriptive statistics and paired-samples t-tests indicated that, in general, the cognitive processes underlying oral responding and questioning are significantly different in terms of mental effort, task difficulty, length of pauses, and the number of grammatical errors. More specifically, the results suggested that the applicants took more mental effort and perceived more task difficulty while constructing the questions for given responses irrespective of their proficiency levels. Both groups also paused significantly longer and committed significantly more grammatical errors when completing the questioning tasks. The paper discusses the study implications for second language teachers and assessors.

Despite a fairly long emergence of critical approaches to language teaching, there still seems to be a dearth of practitioner inquiries narrating experiences of implementing Critical Language Awareness (CLA) in English as Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. Prompted, the present study narrates the measures taken by an Iranian language teacher for encouraging learners to analyze and examine language deployment in the world around them. The participants of this semester-long study were a community of twenty young female students studying English Literature at a state university in Tehran, Iran who were engaged in a series of reading events including reflective reading of advertisements and TV commercials, and critical analysis of literary works, news and journalistic writings, inter alia. The analysis of classroom records plus reflective journals written by the students display the ways through which the students practiced standing back from texts, questioning the biased ideas, developing reasoned position, and responding in their own voices.