درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Research in academic writing has revealed a strong tendency on the part of writers to interactively communicate their scientific findings with their readers. In doing so, the writers should take a position while arguing their propositions. This interaction as proposed by Hyland (2005b) takes places having two sides of stance and engagement. This study targeted the stance component of writer-reader interaction by integrating Hyland’s (2005b) and Hyland and Tse’s (2005a) frameworks to survey lexical and grammatical stance markers in the major subsections of English research articles in anthropology, education, horticulture, and zoology. The corpus included 240 English research articles published during two periods, namely, 1990 and 2010; 60 from each field, 30 articles from 1990 and 30 from 2010 yielding a total number of 1,270,021words. The findings suggested that stancetaking is a common feature of academic writing in the sampled disciplines regardless of the nature of the discipline. Also, hedges ranked first on the list of frequency count. Furthermore, there was a decreasing pattern in the use of stance markers highlighting a convergence among the scholars of the fields with respect to the totality of the facts established day by day. Then, some implications are drawn with plausible applicability in academic writing and EAP syllabus design.

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.

The concept of teacher change is critical in second language teaching and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context due largely to the fact that, almost, whatever we do in teacher education looks for initiating change of one sort or another. A substantial body of research has been dedicated to investigate teacher change (TC) from various perspectives. However, having studied the related literature, we found no robust, valid and reliable measure for TC in EFL context. Accordingly, effort was made to develop and validate a reliable and valid measure that could assess TC in an EFL context. The review of the prior research resulted in the collection of 186 items affecting TC out of which a temporary data driven model of teacher change was developed. 324 Ph.D. and M.A. graduated EFL teachers took part in exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the initial measure. Finally, a 66-item scale consisting of three components and thirteen sub-components was developed.The results showed both factorial validity andinternal consistency reliability for the measure.The TCSsubscales also had strong validity evidence based on the associationsfound. This study has various applications for language teachers and practitioners in the field.

در مقاله حاضر رابطه بین ریسک پذیری، انگیزه ی یادگیری، اضطراب صحبت کردن به زبان انگلیسی و اعتماد به نفس زبانی با درستی، روانی و پیچیدگی گفتاری زبان آموزان زبان انگلیسی مورد بررسی قرار گرفته است. همچنین تاثیر تکرار فعالیت برروی متغیرهای فوق و همچنین بر روی درستی، روانی و پیچیدگی گفتاری زبان آموزان مورد مطالعه قرار گرفته است. جهت انجام تحقیق، پرسشنامه ای که به این منظور طراحی شده به 142 نفر زبان آموزان زبان انگلیسی داده شد. سپس، آنها به طور تصادفی به دو گروه آزمایش و کنترل تقسیم شدند. شرکت کنندگان در گروه آزمایش فعالیت مربوطه را در پنج نوبت که هر کدام یک هفته باهم فاصله داشتند تکرار نمودند. شرکت کنندگان در گروه کنترل فعالیت مربوطه را فقط در دو نوبت به فاصله سه هفته از یک دیگر تکرار نمودند. پرسشنامه مربوطه مجددا در پایان تحقیق به کلیه شرکت کنندگان داده شد. نتایج نشان داد که ریسک پذیری، انگیزه یادگیری، اضطراب صحبت کردن به زبان انگلیسی و اعتماد به نفس زبانی بر روی درستی، روانی و پیچیدگی گفتاری زبان آموزان تاثیرگذار می باشد. علاوه بر این، تکرار فعالیت به آنها کمک می کند تا درستی و پیچیدگی گفتاری زبان انگلیسی خود را بهبود ببخشند.