درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

در ٢٠سال اخیر ترویج آموزش مستقل یکی از دغدغه های طراحان دوره های آموزشی و برنامه ریزان درسی بوده که به لحاظ ایدئولوژیک و روانشناسی نافذ شمرده می شود. با این وجود تخمین آمادگی زبان آموزان برای تغییر به سمت آموزش مستقل قبل از اعمال تغییرات از اهمیت ویژه ای برخوردار می باشد. بنابر این هدف پژوهش کنونی مطالعه ی الگوهای استقلال در میان زبان آموزان ایرانی بوده است. بر اساس تجزیه ی عاملی نتایج پرسشنامه ی میزان استقلال زبان آموزان، مشخص گردید که ٣ عامل زمینه ی رفتار مستقل زبان آموزان را توصیف می کرد. مقاله ی کنونی این ٣ فاکتور را به طور جداگانه تحلیل کرده و در نتیجه تاکید بر استفاده از این ٣ فاکتور در طراحی دروس مبتنی بر آموزش مستقل می نماید.

One skill that student teachers need to develop during their academic studies is the capacity to produce accurate and well-organized texts. This study reports on the comparative impact of metalinguistic feedback (MLF), teacher interactive feedback (TIF(, and the peer-feedback (PF) on the accuracy and organization of postgraduate ELT student teachers’ writing. The participants were 57 postgraduate students who were recruited from a population of 70 postgraduate students, in three classes, that were randomly assigned as the MLF group, the TIF group, and the PF group based on the focus of the presentation and the feedback type they would receive during the 14 session treatment. A hybrid process-oriented and genre-based methodology was employed to teach the identical teaching materials to all the groups with a focus on grammatical features and relevant grammatical exercises in the MLF group,   on reflective and interactive negotiation of form and meaning in the TIF group, and on individual peer-assessment of the peer’s writing in the PF group. The results revealed significantly higher levels of accuracy among the MLF group with no significant difference in the organization of the groups’ writing. The findings underscore the role of MLF in enhancing accuracy. 

Within Systemic Functional Linguistics, Grammatical Metaphor (GM) is a meaning-making resource lying at the experiential level that extends the meaning potential through cross-stratal re-mappings between the grammar and the semantics, boiling down, in one of its manifestations to expressing something that should have been a process (verb) in terms of a thing (noun). This study is an attempt at seeing how the frequency of GM used in the novel ‘Frankenstein’ written by Mary Shelly plays out in its cinematic adaptation. It is an attempt at investigating possible differences in the use of GM in the novel as a type of literary prose fiction and in one of its cinematic adaptations, the respective frequencies, along with what implications these differences carry in terms of generic features and functions of GM. In the 4200-word corpus analyzed for the movie adaptation, there were 70 instances of GM emerging upon analysis. In the 4200-word purposively sampled excerpt of the novel, there were above 330 instances of GM emerging. So the frequency of instances of GM in the written version was much more than that in the cinematic adaptation. This significant difference carries many possible cognitive, semantic, discursive, generic and textual implications. A number of pedagogical implications accrue to this research, such as increasing the knowledge of teachers and English language instructors with regard to the role of GM in making metaphorical forms in different texts, increasing knowledge of how to approach the teaching of the skill of reading and writing in upper-intermediate and intermediate classes, deeper critical reading abilities for learners, etc. 

Self-regulation of learning has been extensively investigated in second language (L2) learning. Many studies have focused on the strategies that language learners employ to regulate their own learning processes. However, motivational self-regulation is considerably less explored. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between motivational self-regulatory strategies (MSRSs) and academic achievement. A motivational self-regulation questionnaire was administered to 64 male and female adult Iranian EFL learners to measure their choice of various strategies. The quantitative data was analyzed by applying correlational and multivariate analyses. The results demonstrated that there was a strong relationship between motivational self-regulatory strategy use and academic achievement. However, no difference was found between male and female learners in their use of the strategies. Further examination revealed that higher-achieving students differed from lower-achieving participants in their preference for strategies. The article concludes that while all learners use extrinsic rewards to self-regulate their motivation, more successful learners tend to manipulate learning tasks to make the tasks intrinsically interesting and pleasant. Also, more successful learners set both long-term and short-term goals to motivate themselves. The results underscore the importance of students’ personal interests, needs and goals, and suggest that teachers foster learners’ command of the strategies through instruction and cooperative activities.

Lexical inferencing is one of the most important strategies in vocabulary learning and it plays an important role in dealing with unknown words in a text. In this regard, the aim of this study was to determine the lexical inferencing strategies used by Iranian EFL learners when they encounter unknown words at both text and sentence levels. To this end, forty lower intermediate students were divided into two groups. For the first group, a text with 10 underlined words was given and for the second group, the same underlined words were given in separate sentences. The students were supposed to read the text and the sentences and to guess the meaning of the underlined words. Then some lexical inferencing strategies were given to them to determine which strategies they used in guessing the meaning of unknown words. The results showed that they used different strategies like using local context and word association in lexical inferencing and also they were more successful at the text level than the sentence one. The results also indicated that they were strategic learners using their own strategies including translation and cultural background knowledge to guess the meaning of the unknown words.

The present study attempted to investigate the relationship between English language teacher perfectionism, teacher burnout, and teacher efficacy. For the purpose of the study, 114 teachers in Tabadkan District, Mashhad, were chosen. Eighty-Three of the participants were female and thirty-one were male with different majors in English language. Three questionnaires, namely the Scale on English Language Teacher Perfectionism (SELTP), Maslach Burnout Inventory, and Teacher Efficacy Scale, were used to collect data on the variables under investigation. The data were analyzed using correlational statistics and t test procedure. The obtained results indicated that there was a high positive correlation between perfectionism, teacher burnout, and efficacy, that female teachers were more efficacious than male ones, and that the magnitude of correlation coefficients was higher for the male participants.

The present study was an attempt to investigate the effect of IT system-based instruction vs. traditional instruction of teaching English on Iranian low-intermediate EFL learners’ reading comprehension ability in a smart school in Tonekabon, Mazandaran, Iran. To collect the data, 60 low-intermediate high school learners took part in the study. As to the homogeneity of the participants, they took Solution Placement Test (SPT). The participants were divided into one experimental group (i.e. receiving the treatment in terms of using smart tools) and one control group (i.e. receiving no treatment and being traditionally taught through white board). A reading comprehension test (pre-test) was given to examine the participants’ initial knowledge of reading comprehension. Similar to the pre-test, a reading comprehension test (post-test) was utilized to check the participants’ performance of reading comprehension and look into their probable progress as a result of receiving the treatment. Findings revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group after the treatment highlighting the success of instruction in enhancing the students’ reading comprehension ability. The results suggest the application of smart tools to promote interaction among the learners and assist them to freely express their thoughts in the e-learning environment.

In spite of the importance of teacher's motivation only a limited number of studies have been conducted on teacher's demotivation in Iran. This study was an attempt to investigate demotivating factors among Iranian EFL language institute teachers in terms of years of teaching experience. To this end, the researchers tried to utilize a questionnaire as a research method. To collect data, a validated questionnaire was administered to a sample of 77 English teachers who were teaching in Iranian language institutes in Najafabad, Isfahan, Iran. A convenience sampling was used in this study. The data were classified and analyzed based upon the relevant research questions. The one-way between-groups ANOVA conducted on demotivating factors showed that there was a significant difference between professional development and other domains of demotivating factors among the groups of English teachers. Moreover, it was uncovered that insufficient income was among the most crucial factors providing dissatisfaction for Iranian EFL teachers in the field of teaching process. Therefore, it is important for educational institution to improve teachers’ perceptions of their job through improving job environment and condition or payments to manage language learner institutes better than before.

This study aimed to investigate how English language teaching textbooks portrayed male and female social actors according to their social roles and gender identities. To examine the linguistic representation of male and female social actors and construction of gender identities in ELT textbooks, Top Notch series was selected. To do so, attempts were made to analyze the series in terms of the features introduced in two analytical models: Van Leeuwen’s (1996) framework and Halliday's transitivity model (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). All of the sentences in reading passages and conversations were counted and analyzed critically through discursive features of these two models. The findings of this study revealed significant differences in representation of male and female social actors in some discursive features. Male social actors were described as more autonomous, successful, and active compared to female social actors.

این تحقیق در نظر دارد مجموعه ا ی کتاب های زبان عمومی تالیف شده توسط نویسندگان انگلیسی زبان (4کتاب) و فارسی زبان (5 کتاب) را از حیث اهداف یادگیری در چارچوب اصلاح شده ی بلوم (2011) ارزیابی کند که دریابد کدام سطوح از چارچوب اصلاح شده ی بلوم در این کتابها بارزتر هستند . بدین منظور محتوای کتابها براساس طرح کدگذاری شده که توسط رزمجو و کاظم بور (2012) طراحی شده، کدگذاری شد. پایایی طرح کدگذاری شده نیز مورد آزمایش قرار گرفت. سپس اطلاعات موجود مورد ارزیابی قرار گرفت و فراوانی و درصد وقوع اهداف یادگیری متفاوت مورد محاسبه واقع شد. طبق یافته های این تحقیق, برجسته ترین سطوح یادگیری در کتابهای تالیف شده توسط نویسندگان انگلیسی زبان و فارسی زبان، سطوح پایینی مهارتهای اندیشیدن یا همان سه سطح پایینی در چارچوب اصلاح شده ی بلوم می باشند. با این وجود، سطوح بالایی مهارتهای اندیشیدن یا همان سه سطح بالایی در چارچوب اصلاح شده ی بلوم در کتاب های تالیف شده توسط نویسندگان انگلیسی زبان بیشتر دیده میشود . به طور کلی از تحقیق حاضر برمی آید که کتاب های تالیف شده توسط نویسندگان فارسی زبان نمی تواند زبان آموزان را به تفکر انتقادی وادارد. در پایان پیشنهاداتی چند به معلمان و همچنین طراحان کتاب ارایه شده است.