درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present study investigated the effect of blended online and face-to-face instruction on the use of reading strategies by Iranian EFL learners. Out of 100 pre-selected learners, 60 homogeneous participants were identified as intermediate, according to their scores on the Oxford Placement Test. The participants were assigned to experimental (n=30) and control (n=30) groups. Then, a pretest was administered to assess participants’ current knowledge of reading comprehension. Both groups received a 7-session reading instruction. Whereas the experimental group was subjected to blended online environment where they could take advantage of Nicenet platform, the participants in the control group received materials, instruction and feedback through traditional methods in the classroom. After the experiment, the participants were required to take a reading comprehension test similar pretest as the post-test. In order to compare the frequency of reading strategy use by the experimental and control groups, the participants in the two groups were asked to fill out the Reading Strategies Questionnaire both before and after the experiment. The results of t-test between pre- and post-test showed that there is a significant difference between the experimental group and the control group in using the reading strategies.The findings of this study could help EFL teachers and syllabus designers gain insights into the processes learners go through when reading.

The present study attempted to investigate the impact of cooperation versus collaboration on college students` reading ability. To fulfill the purpose of the study, 90 participants were chosen from among 140 by means of administering the Nelson Proficiency Test. They were divided into three groups: cooperative group, collaborative group, and control group. A fifty-item multiple-choice reading vocabulary test was developed, validated, and used as the pretest. The results of the one-way ANOVA showed that there was no significant difference among the groups. Then after a number of cooperative and collaborative strategies used as the treatment in this study in six sessions of ninety minutes for each experimental group class, (control group without treatment) the posttest, which resembled the pretest in many respects, was administered to the three groups. The results of one-way ANOVA and Scheffee Test showed that the cooperative and collaborative groups worked better than the control group, and the collaborative one performed best.

Gender representation has long been studied in both verbal and visual modes of ELT textbooks. However, regarding the visual mode, research has mainly focused on superficial analyses of how often each gender appears in different roles rather than on how the two genders are represented. The tools proposed in Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) social semiotics framework, however, permit deep analysis of images taking into consideration how pictorial elements are shown both alone and in relation to other pictorial elements, on the one hand, and the viewers on the other. Following the above-mentioned framework, the present study applied the three dimensions of representational, compositional and interactive meaning presented to 16 photographs randomly selected from the Interchange (Third Edition) series (Richards, 2005) to explore gender portrayals and disclose ideologies in the visual mode of the series. Qualitative data analysis showed some ideologies and stereotypical portrayals, each of which appeared either in one or a few photographs. Taken together, the findings indicated gender bias in favor of men in the series