درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The aim of the current study was to investigate whether L2 dialogue shadowing practice would have an effect on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ conversation ability. For this purpose, 30 Iranian intermediate EFL learners at Padideh language center participated in the experiment of the study. The participants were divided into two groups of 15 who were assigned to the experimental and control group of the study randomly. A pretest of conversation ability was administered to both groups, the experimental group received 10 sessions of teaching L2 conversation as well as dialogue shadowing technique (DST) while the control group received a placebo, in other words, teaching L2 conversation via existing method. After the treatment, the same test was administered as posttest to both groups of study. The data obtained from the tests in this study were analyzed via independent sample T-test between performance of the groups, and the paired-sample T-test was used between the pretest and posttest of each group to show the progress. The results revealed that Iranian EFL learners in the experimental group performed better and received higher score in conversation test after 10 sessions of treatment.

A lot of studies have been done in the developed countries due to the importance of job satisfaction; however, only a limited number of studies have been conducted on English teachers' job satisfaction in Iran. Therefore, this study has been designed to recognize the amount of job satisfaction among Iranian EFL teachers regarding their gender, academic degree, and major. To do this end, both qualitative and quantitative research methods, a questionnaire, and a structured interview were utilized. To collect data, a validated questionnaire which was developed by Karavas (2010) administered to a sample of 53 males and females English teachers, teaching in different institutes, at private schools, and at universities in Genaveh Port, Bushehr Province. After gathering the questionnaires, all of the teachers were interviewed. The study findings provided the evidence that females were more satisfied than males. Moreover, the results indicated that the participants with BA/BSc significantly had higher job satisfaction than the participants with MA/MSc degree. But the comparison between the other groups did not reveal any significant difference. Furthermore, the findings clearly demonstrated that there is no significant difference between teachers' job satisfaction and their major. The results of the interview revealed that Iranian EFL teachers satisfied with their jobs because they like teaching, and the most important reason of all teachers' job dissatisfaction is their low salary.

Drawing on Walsh's (2012) idea that boosting learners' contribution and interaction can play a key role in their foreign language learning, this mixed-methods study tried to cast some light on the ways by which teachers, via their choice and use of language, create or block learners' contribution in direct interactions in the classroom. A total of 800-minute recordings of 10 teachers' talks and their learners' in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes were studied utilizing a Conversation Analysis methodology. The interaction patterns identified in the recordings suggest that teachers could manipulate their talk either to facilitate or obstruct learners' involvement by the inserted turns they take. The findings of the study indicate that the teachers need to minimize their interventions while the learners taking their turns, and instead pave the way for a more interactive discourse. In addition, a 'listening culture' in the classrooms should be encouraged in order to create opportunities for more classroom interactive talk. A number of implications for teachers and teacher trainers are also given.

Given the fact that few studies have investigated the English language needs of EAP students in Iran, the present study was an attempt to analyze the needs of Iranian EAP learners of Humanities and Social Sciences. To this end, 114 EAP learners at different educational levels (BA, MA, and PhD) and with different English proficiency levels (elementary, intermediate, and advanced) were asked to provide their responses to a questionnaire. Moreover, ten EAP learners and eight EAP instructors were asked to write narratives about their experiences in EAP courses. Their narratives were then analyzed based on Strauss and Corbin's (1998) systematic approach. The results revealed that the EAP courses did not pay the deserved attention to writing, speaking, and listening skills, while the coverage of the sub-skills (grammar and vocabulary) was successful. Moreover, it was revealed that the EAP textbooks were insufficient in terms of the inclusion of language skills, community-specific cultural issues and conventions, and the topical knowledge. The analysis of the EAP learners’ needs also showed that not all interaction types happened in the EAP courses. Furthermore, the analysis of the narratives of EAP learners and EAP instructors indicated that the EAP curriculum, EAP textbooks and also EAP assessment should include the four language skills, provide a communicative venue for EAP learners to practice their disciplinary issues, and design communicative materials. It can be concluded that the current EAP curriculum needs revision to fulfill the EAP learners’ present and target situation needs.

The present study aimed at providing a typology of Iranian supervisors’ written feedback on L2 graduate students’ theses/dissertations and examining the way different speech functions are employed to put the supervisors’ thoughts and feelings into words. In so doing, a corpus of comments, including 15,198 comments provided on 87 TEFL theses and dissertations by 30 supervisors were analyzed. We employed an inductive category formation procedure to form the typology of comments, and followed a deductive procedure to put the comments into the three categories of expressive, referential, and directive speech functions. The findings showed that supervisors provided seven main categories of comments on theses and dissertations: grammar and sentence structure, content, method, organization, references, formatting, and academic procedures. Furthermore, the findings indicated that supervisors employed comments with different patterns and for different purposes on MA and PhD students’ texts.

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.

In English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and bilingual language classrooms, code-switching is widespread among teacher-student and student-student interactions; however, there seem to be few or no studies tracking the perceptions and practices of EFL learners toward code-switching. Therefore, the aim of this study was to identify the perceptions and practices of high and low achievers toward teacher code-switching with focus on the possible limitations and benefits that it might have in language classrooms. For this purpose, the researchers used a qualitative design in the form of grounded theory. Accordingly, 11 high and 13 low achievers were interviewed individually and in focus groups. Further, the elicited responses were transcribed and codified using Straus and Corbin’s (1998) constant comparative method. In addition, for the purpose of validation, real observations of 10 university classes in different English courses were made.  The findings revealed 4 major themes and 26 categories for high and low achievers. Consequently, the findings implicated that code-switching was an advantageous tool at the disposal of English teachers.

Metacognitive reading strategies play a significant role in reading comprehension and educational success. Being noticeably absent from many Iranian classrooms and largely unaware of by many language learners and teachers, metacognitive reading strategies have fallen into oblivion in English language teaching, research, learning, and assessment. The present study was an attempt to measure the metacognitive reading strategy (MRS) awareness among Iranian university students majoring in English Translation Studies. It also aimed at determining whether gender and learners’ different academic levels would make any difference in using various types of MRS. Furthermore, it investigated the relationship between Iranian EFL learners’ awareness of MRS and their reading comprehension performance. A sample of 45 EFL university students majoring in English Translation at Chabahar Maritime University participated in this study. They were asked to complete the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) questionnaire adapted from Tavakoli (2014) and to take a TOEFL Junior Standard Reading Comprehension Test. The results revealed that although the overall strategy use among these students was low (M=2.42), support reading strategies were used the most and problem-solving strategies were the least frequently used ones. Additionally, no significant difference was found between males and females as well as different academic levels in the use of MRS. No significant relationship was found between students’ overall use of metacognitive reading strategies and their reading comprehension achievement. The study concludes with a number of pedagogical implications and lists several guidelines for future research.

The present study examined the effect of four types of post reading-based tasks with different index of task-induced involvement load (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001) on EFL learners’ recognition and recall of unfamiliar L2 vocabularies. To this end, 88 intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to four groups and were instructed to employ four different tasks after reading two narrative texts: (1) simple sentence writing; (2) text summary writing; (3) creative sentence writing; and (4) imaginary story writing. A day after the output activity session, the participants took two post-tests: the production test and the recognition test. Three weeks later, the delayed post-tests were administered. Mixed ANOVA (Split-plot) was run to compare the performances of the groups on immediate and delayed post-tests. The results revealed that there were overall significant within-group and between-group differences among four groups of the study both in immediate and delayed posttests. The creative sentence writing group outperformed in comparison to the other three groups. The results of this study turned out to be partially consistent with involvement load hypothesis.

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.