درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Although decades of research have well elaborated on teacher professional development, we still do not have a thorough picture about what teacher professional development could entail and what components it consists of. The present study aims to develop and validate a teacher professional development scale in an Iranian English foreign language context. An initial tentative model with 130 items was piloted and tested through exploratory and confirmatory data analyses on a sample of 400 EFL teachers. This level resulted in the removal of 28 items in our sample loaded, resulting in a final 102 teacher professional development inventory. The developed inventory measures the extent to which EFL teachers are professionally developed and makes teachers aware of multiple characteristics of professionally developed teachers. These competencies are essential components of teacher professional development, enabling the teachers to utilize them in everyday teaching and learning practices in the classroom settings which, as a result, leads to student achievement. As teachers fulfill important professional roles, they need valid instruments to assess their day-to-day functioning in the class. With the instrument developed and validated in the current research, we, in fact, allow language teachers to assess their extent of professional development in different pedagogical contexts.

In Iran, most English teachers’ method of teaching writing is merely to have students do some writing exercises or simply to give them writing tests without any instruction, but writing is not an easy task for students, and teachers should be able to do more to facilitate their students’ writing. One of the ways to aid writing is dynamic assessment via graduated prompt. The graduated prompting procedure provides intervention in the form of predetermined standardized prompts that are sequenced from general to more specific. The present study aimed at investigating the effect of DA on the improvement of Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ picture-cued writing tasks. The study was conducted with 35 Iranian EFL learners (male and female) who were randomly selected from an available population pool of 70 EFL learners enrolled in two language institutes in Esfahan, Iran. The data were collected via a pretest, a posttest and a questionnaire. The analysis of the test scores through t-test revealed that the experimental group did statistically better in the test. Furthermore, almost all of the participants held positive attitudes toward writing, and their confidence in their own English writing ability increased. The implication of the study is that dynamic assessment via graduated prompt can be incorporated into the regular writing program.

Nowadays computers are increasingly being incorporated into school curriculums and serious games are occupying the educational games markets. This article addressed the integration of serious games as tools for learning and teaching English in Iranian schools to zero-beginner students. An experiment was concluded using Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) to investigate the effectiveness of using serious games; namely, Mingoville English as an educational aid and also to examine parents, students and instructors’ attitudes towards using serious games. To this end, 60 female students were chosen and divided into two groups. The control group was taught in the conventional way and the experimental group received the educational aiding material Mingoville, a web-based serious game program, as the treatment. The results of the analyses revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group as the method of teaching was changed. The study also showed the willingness of children, their parents, and teachers toward using such games. It can be concluded that using serious games such as Mingoville can be regarded as an effective tool in teaching English to Iranian EFL children at schools and language institutes. The study can benefit teachers and heads of institutes to add serious games as aiding instructional materials to their English classes.

The present research tries to show how race, class, and gender and intersectionality in general, have their decisive impact on the black- American women; and how Alice Walker as a womanist, in her selected short stories, tries to show that black women in the U.S. suffer two-fold acts of oppression and discrimination, i.e. male violence affects all women in social life, irrespective of age or social standing, and at the same time being black has exacerbated the black American women’s situation. In the present study, the mentioned socio-political, socio-cultural and institutionalized intersectionality have been analyzed from the perspective of Alice Walker’s selected short stories. Full analysis have been carried out, from applied linguistic point of view,  in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” and “Roselily” while Alice Walker’s other short stories have been consulted for further analysis and discussion. The method used to analyze the data is descriptive research method.

پژوهش حاضر رمان نایب کنسول مارگریت دوراس نویسنده معاصر فرانسوی را مورد تجزیه و تحلیل قرار می دهد که در آن شخصیت ها از اختلالات مربوط به خواب رنج می برند. هدف ما اثبات ارتباطی مستقیم بین احساسات این شخصیت ها وکیفیت و کمیت خواب آنها می باشد، زیرا همانند اکثر آثار دوراس احساسات و عواطف پیش برنده داستان و شکل دهنده ساختار آن هستند. از طرف دیگر باید گفت بیش خوابی و یا بی خوابی شخصیتهای داستان همانند ژان مارک دو اش، شارل روست و دختری که شخصیت اصلی و البته بدون نام می باشد، ریشه در احساساتی کاملا منفی و ناخوشایند نظیر بی تفاوتی، خشم، ملال، خستگی و نارضایتی دارد که خود این احساسات نیز از ناکامی و عدم توفیق شخصیت ها در رسیدن به خواسته هایشان ناشی می گردد. در واقع می خواهیم نشان دهیم که بیش خوابی یا بی خوابی نوعی بیان روان تنی در نوشتار هستند که از احساسات منفی شخصیت ها سرچشمه می گیرد. بدین منظور برای شناسایی، ریشه یابی و اثبات این حالات و عواطف منجر به اختلالات خواب، نشانه-معناشناسی عواطف را برای روش تحقیق برگزیده ایم، که از خلال افعال مؤثر رابطه بین فاعل و موضوع ارزشی را نشان می دهد. در حقیقت افعال مودال (مؤثر نظیر دانستن، خواستن، بایستن، توانستن و باور داشتن) تعیین کننده حالات روحی فاعل در ارتباط با موضوعات ارزشی می باشد. در تحلیل نشانه شناسی عواطف بیشتر از طرحواره احساسی ژاک فونتنی بهره برده ایم که روند عاطفی داستان را در پنج مرحله بررسی 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. 

To analyze and evaluate textbooks, researchers have either proposed scales and checklists to be filled by teachers and learners or conducted qualitative investigations of the match between SLA theories and textbook activities. This study, however, employs the microstructural approach of schema theory to scrutinize the reading passages of “Mosaic 1 Reading”. To this end, 17 passages of the textbook were randomly chosen and their constituting words were explored as semantic, syntactic, and parasyntactic schemata. The passages were also analyzed in terms of their readability indices. The results showed that they consist of 3722 schema types, 2979 (80%) of which are semantic in nature. Although the textbook aims at “academic success” at English language “proficiency levels”, it provides no objective definition of what they stand for. In terms of readability, however, the passages vary in difficulty from grade three in primary school to college level. Further, the textbook is discussed in terms of its constituting schemata and suitability to the Iranian context and suggestions are made for future research. The findings of this study have important implications for language teaching, testing and materials development. They show that language proficiency must be defined in terms of schema types and the bulk of class time must be spent on teaching semantic schemata rather than syntactic and parasyntactic ones. Similarly, for testing the reading comprehension of these passages, the number and type of test items must be based on the percentage of semantic and syntactic schema types and subjective criteria such as teachers’ intuition or experience must be avoided both in teaching and testing the comprehension of passages.

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.