درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Teacher education is deemed to play a critical role in revolutionizing any education system. As a result, pre-service teacher education has received considerable attention in education systems world over. In the context of Iran, the process of teacher education has not been properly implemented and following their being recruited teachers would go directly to classes, without possessing adequate professional competencies. Hence, the present study intends to provide a comparative account of EFL pre-service teacher education in Iran and five other countries attempting to address applicable issues, criticisms, and constructive lessons to be learned from the relevant experiences of such countries. To this end, the study examines recruitment requiremnets, EFL teacher professional preparation and evaluation, and teaching practice in the Iranian context and those of other countries.In so doing, this study analyzed the existing documents and reports published by international and governmental organizations and previous research done relevant to the countries included in the study. The results indicated that almost all the five countries bear some resemblance to one another in pre-service teacher recruitment requirements. Iran and Japan, however, seem to have a more sensitive stance on teachers and conducting interviews with candidates than other countries.  Moreover, Germany and the U.S. appear to have built up a more sophisticated teacher education system compared to other countries. The results further revealed that the TEP program in Iran has made arrangements to keep up with the new trends in teacher education and has partly been successful in following in developed countries’ footsteps.

The present study aimed at investigating the effect of critical thinking (CT) versus brainstorming (BS) as pre-writing stage activities on English as a foreign language (EFL) pre-intermediate learners’ expository writing. To achieve this aim, 100 pre-intermediate level participants studying at Naft Language Center in Ahvaz were selected based on convenience sampling method. They took part in Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT) and 60 of them were assigned into three equal homogeneous groups; two experimental groups of CT and BS compared to one control group (CO). They received three different kinds of treatments lasting 13 sessions of 90 minutes. The CT group received exercises on major CT skills (e.g., inferencing, recognition, deduction) and BS group go through think, pair and share steps to outline the writing tasks. Prior to the main study, students wrote a 150-word expository writing about one of the topics chosen from their textbooks as a pre-test. Finally, all groups were asked to write another 150-word expository writing as a post-test after the implementation of the proposed treatment. The results indicated that both CT and BS as pre-writing stage activities led to the enhancement of the participants’ expository writing performance.

The present exploratory study aimed to provide a more tangible and comprehensive picture of the construct of investment in language learning through investigating the issue from a quantitative perspective. To this end, the present researchers followed three main phases. First, a hypothesized model of investment in language learning with six components was developed for the Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) learners based on the extensive readings of the literature on investment, consultations with a panel of experts, three university professors in the relevant fields, and interviews with 20 language learners. Second, a questionnaire was developed and validated based on the proposed model to represent its components. Finally, the data collected through this questionnaire were fed into the model to see to what extent the model fitted the data. The participants were male and female English language learners belonging to different age groups and English language proficiency levels.The initial results showed poor values; however, the model was trimmed by removing one item from the questionnaire, and final statistical indices showed that the model fitted the data.

With the advent of globalization, especially in its third phase (see Robertson, 2003), global relations of domination have undermined abuse of power at national and local levels (Fairclough, 2001). Global ELT textbooks, as corollaries of the globalization process, are not immune to the embedment of discriminatory discourses, as various studies have shown (see for example, Gray, 2010, 2012; Babaii and Sheikhi, 2017). On the other hand, a social actor analysis of verbal and visual discourse will contribute significantly to the disclosure of discriminatory discourses (see van Leeuwen, 2008; Hart, 2014). The current study, therefore, reduces the gap in research on ideology of ELT materials by probing into the nursery rhymes in children and young-adult ELT textbooks. Visual representation of social actors in the images accompanying nursery rhymes in Magic Time, English Time, Let's Go and Family and Friends were, thus, examined, using van Leeuwen's (2008) framework. Regarding results, the most frequent exclusionary discourses in the corpus included religion, nationality, race, and gender respectively. Significantly, it was found that monochromatic depiction of social actors constituted a strategy for the discursive construction of otherness in Family and Friends. Additionally, a process, called whitenization of blacks in the terminology of the current study, was found to be at work in which blacks were depicted as having the facial features of whites.

Although most researchers have recently considered the role of test-taking strategies as one of the most vital factors in test taking process, it has been ignored by most EFL teachers in educational and academic settings including Iran. Because of the importance of test-taking strategies in EFL learners’ performance in tests, this research was set out to examine what strategies Iranian EFL test takers employed in reading comprehension tests. Furthermore, the present paper aimed at finding any possible relationship between test-taking strategies and test takers’ performance on reading comprehension tests. Discovering the best predictors of EFL reading test performance among several categories of test-taking strategies was also investigated. To this end, 135 EFL students were chosen based on their availability. All of the students were female, majoring in different fields of study. Three kinds of materials including multiple-choice reading comprehension tests, a questionnaire, and interviews were utilized to investigate the research questions. Data analysis included descriptive statistics, Pearson Product Correlation, and stepwise regression. The results showed a significant, positive, but low correlation between the students’ total reading score and planning and also monitoring strategies. Furthermore, planning strategy proved to be a predictor of English reading comprehension test.

L2 language socialization asks how learners come to gain the ability to write appropriately and sufficiently in an institutional academic community of practice. In the same line, this study focuses on the process of socialization of an Iranian English L2 essay writing class in the context of higher education. The theoretical backgrounds rely on the socialization and Vygotsky's sociocultural theories. Three case studies were analyzed throughout six weeks. The learners' essays, outlines, and reflective diaries were analyzed to trace their development in appropriating academic discourse and argumentation. Also, an interview session was held at the end of the study in which the issues regarding the whole experience of socialization were discussed with the participants. The results suggested that each learner pursued their path of socialization based on their individual and social needs of the academic discourse community. Accordingly, a model demonstrating their paths of development is presented. The model shows that the new-comers to this social site of engagement were mediated by the old-timer agent of practice (instructor) to appropriate the values, principles, and behaviors of this community of practice through the activities they were engaged in.

For the first time, this study combined models and principles of authentic assessment from two parallel fields of applied linguistics as well as general education to investigate the authenticity of the TOEFL iBT speaking module. The study consisted of two major parts, namely task analysis and task survey. Utilizing Bachman and Palmer’s (1996) definition of authenticity, the task analysis examined the degree of the correspondence between the characteristics of the speaking module tasks in the TOEFL iBT test and those of target language use (TLU) tasks. In the task survey, a Likert Scale questionnaire of authenticity was developed by the researcher based on Herrington and Herrington’s (1998; 2006) four criteria of authentic assessment. The questionnaire was sent through email to 120 subjects who had already taken the test in order to elicit their attitudes towards the degree of the authenticity of the speaking section tasks. The results of the task analysis revealed a limited correspondence between the characteristics of the test tasks and those of the TLU tasks. However, the results of the task survey indicated that except for one factor (indicators), most of the test takers had a positive view toward the authenticity of the speaking module tasks in terms of the three other factors (context, student factor, task factor).

Translation seems a spoon feeding activity if it is taken mere transference of meaning from one language to another i.e. source language to target language. A good translation is usually considered, a translation in which merit of the original work is so completely transfused into another as to be distinctly apprehended by the native speaker of the country to which that language belongs as it is by those who speak the language of the original work. This vendetta leads to the presupposition that there may be other types of translations i.e. a bad translation, an average translation, or the best translation. There is another controversy of free (sense) and literal translation (sense & style). Sometimes it is taken as word for word translation and sometimes as sense for sense translation. But the problem arises when the cultural, poetical, linguistic, stylistic, and technological issues are involved in translation. To find out its inherent impossibility, the participants were given one quotation to translate it from Urdu to English. It is concluded that although the quotation which was given for translation was quite simple and did not have cultural and equivalence problems to a great degree, yet the varied responses with respect to structure, understanding, punctuation, and expression show that it was not an easy task

This study tried to compare the possible differences between female and male EFL students with respect to the use of lexical hedges in their academic spoken language. To fulfil this objective, 40 Iranian upper-intermediate EFL learners majoring in TEFL were chosen from Islamic Azad University of Abadan, Iran. The selected participants were assigned into two equal groups namely male group (n=20) and female group (n=20). Then, five discussion sessions in a single gendered context were separately recorded for male and female participants. Frequency counts and chi-square were used to analyze the obtained data. By utilizing the framework of hedges, it is deduced that that there are differences among female and male respondents’ propensity in selecting word of lexical hedges. Female responders tend to utilize more lexical hedges than male responders. In such manner, most frequently lexical hedges of fillers such as; hmm, uhh, you know, yeah were used most frequently by female respondents in their utterances; while male respondents most repeatedly utilized lexical hedges of fillers like; I think, uhh, yeah in their utterances. Female respondents had broad range variegation in picking words of lexical hedges while male respondents were not sufficiently productive in selecting the words of lexical hedges. It was demonstrated by the number of lexical hedges applied in giving viewpoints in debate and discussion context.