درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present study intends to probe the impediments for the practicality of Critical language pedagogy (CLP) in higher education system of Iran. To do this, 20 Iranian university instructors, holding Ph.D. degrees in TEFL, were asked to read a passage reflecting the main characteristics of transformative pedagogy. To explore the main obstacles, they were invited for a semi-structured interview. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The data were analyzed using Thomas (2006) inductive approach including frequent, dominant, or significant themes. The results revealed a number of themes that illustrate macro and micro inhibiting factors Iranian EFL instructors encounter toward implementing the principles of CLP. The findings are discussed and suggestions are provided for teachers to transform transmission approaches into transformative and dialogic ones.

As a part of a larger-scale research, the present study aimed to use the main tenets of sociocultural perspective; namely, mediation, internalization, zone of proximal development, and the activity theory, to analyze the novice and expert teachers’ professional development through personal practical theorizing as an awareness raising technique. Furthermore, the study attempted to identify the contextual factors hindering teachers’ pedagogical beliefs enactment. The areas of mismatches between the teachers’ beliefs and practices were identified in the previous phases of the study, and personal practical theorizing procedure was implemented in the program to help teachers converge their beliefs and practices. Within the domain of the qualitative research, a multi-case study design was utilized, employing eight novice and experienced teachers who were selected through purposive sampling. The teachers’ professional development in the proposed program was analyzed through the lens of sociocultural perspectives, and the contextual factors hindering teachers’ beliefs enactment were enumerated based on the results gleaned through interview sessions.

The present article aims to provide a synchronic study of the inflectional or morpho-syntactic categories of noun in Sistani dialect. These categories comprise person, number, gender or noun class, definiteness, case, and possession. Linguistic data was collected via recording free speech, and interviewing with 30 (15 females, 15 males) illiterate Sistani language consultants of age 40–102 years, living in central (Markazi) district of Zabol city in Sistan and Baluchestan province of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The research results indicate that nouns are inflected in three distinct persons i.e. first, second, and third persons with either singular or plural in number. Grammatical gender of nouns takes no specific morphological marker. As to the category of definiteness, this dialect makes use of syntactic devices (like demonstrative adjectives), and/or morphological devices (such as the use of /=ak/ and /=e/ clitics) to display the definite and indefinite nouns. Its case system is nominative-accusative system. In this regard, only the accusative or objective case marking is morphologically realized by the object marker /=a/. In addition, possession is expressed through the use of the word /mAl=e/ ‘belonging to’ or the preposition /az/ ‘from, of’ along with nouns/noun phrases/personal pronouns and also applying ezɑfe - construction in the form of genitive structure.

This study aimed at developing and validating a new model and instrument to explore attitudes of Iranian EFL learners towards English as an International Language (EIL).In so doing, the researchers followed several rigorous steps including extensive literature review, content selection, item generation, designing the rating scales and personal information part, Delphi technique, item revision, pilot testing, reliability estimation, and finally validation. In the first phase, five dimensions were identified for the new model based on the literature and interview with a panel of experts. An initial draft of the questionnaire consisting of 33 items was designed for investigating learners’ attitudes towards EIL. Then, it was piloted with a group of 170 Iranian EFL learners. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of the obtained data revealed that the questionnaire consisted of a five factor structure. Consequently, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was carried out with another 409 Iranian EFL learners to check the fitness of the proposed model. The result of CFA indicated that the model enjoyed a satisfactory level of goodness of fit, showing that the five-factor structure including cultural realism, linguistic cultural disposition (negative), (dis)ownership of English, EIL posture, and localization was not the result of random variance in the learners’ responses.

This paper focuses on the impact of an asynchronous online discussion forum on the development of students’ ability in and attitudes toward writing in English. Two groups of third-year students (N = 60) majoring in English were assigned to two treatment and control groups, each receiving different types of feedback. Students in the treatment group were required to participate in an online learning environment and exchange feedback with their peers, whereas students in the control group received the traditional face-to-face feedback provided by the teacher. The results of a pre-test, a post-test, and a survey revealed that students’ writing in the treatment group significantly improved, both semantically and syntactically, and they expressed more positive attitudes toward writing. The findings also indicated that as a result of engaging in the asynchronous online discussion forum and exchanging feedback with peers, students exhibited more control over their work, involved more effectively with the learning tasks, collaborated more with their classmates, and employed self-assessment strategies to independently revise or rewrite their work. The implications of the study offer guidelines to improve and facilitate writing skill in EFL contexts.

Much interest has recently been directed toward the knowledge of collocations in the field of second language learning since they have been asserted to improve fluency. The current study was intended to examine the effect of verbal and visuospatial working memory spans on the processing of collocations using a Self-Pace Reading Task (SPRT) and relevant working memory tasks. To this end, participants were divided into two distinct groups (high vs. low) based on their scores in the verbal and visuospatial memory tasks. The results of the analyses revealed that there was not a statistically significant difference between high and low verbal memory groups in the processing of collocations. However, a significant difference was witnessed between high and low visuospatial memory groups in their reaction time. These results have important implications for the multi-word processing models and the way collocations should be taught in the classroom.

Over the past twenty-five years, researchers have expressed considerable interest in titles of academic publications. Unfortunately, conference paper titles (CPTs) have only recently begun to receive attention. The aim of this study, therefore, is to investigate the text length, syntactic structure, and lexicon of CPTs in Applied Linguistics. A data set of 698 titles was selected from the 2008 International Conference on Applied Linguistics held in Germany. The results from the analysis indicated that, first; the average text length of CPTs in Applied Linguistics is 10.4 words. Second, CPTs tended to be nominal, consistent with the finding in several titleology studies. Last, the lexical items of CPTs comprised a rich array of four main categories of lexicon (domain-specific words, research-related words, verbal expressions, and country/local references). These findings have implications for the scholarship on CPTs, academic writing pedagogy, and future research on academic titles.

The present research addressed the prosodic realization of global and local text structure and content in the spoken discourse data produced by Persian EFL learners. Two newspaper articles were analyzed using Rhetorical Structure Theory. Based on these analyses, the global structure in terms of hierarchical level, the local structure in terms of the relative importance of text segments and the rhetorical relations between text segments were identified. The texts were read aloud by 18 high-proficient Persian learners of English. We measured pause durations preceding segments, F0-maxima (as a correlate of pitch range) and speech rates of the segments. Results suggested that speakers give prosodic indications about hierarchical level by means of variations in pause duration but not pitch range or speech rate. Furthermore, it was found that speakers articulate causally related segments with shorter in between pauses and at faster rate than non-causally related segments. However, they did not vary any of the prosodic measures to distinguish between important vs. unimportant segments. Overall, the results suggest that (1) variations in pause duration and speech rate are not used systematically by Persian EFL speakers as fully structured cuing devices to indicate organization of spoken discourse, importance of sentences and meaning relations between sentences; (2) pitch change structuring as a cue to discourse prosodic prominence is completely absent in Persian learners' text production. The results are not consistent with earlier findings of prosodic realization of text structure and content in English native speakers' discourse data, but are in line with those obtained for non-native spoken discourse.