درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The importance of input has been a broadly documented concept in the field of second or foreign language acquisition. However, kinds of input and ways of its presentation are among the controversial issues in L2 classroom research. Therefore, this study was designed to compare the effects of three kinds of input-based instruction on intake and acquisition of the English causative structures by Iranian EFL learners. A total of 105 university students in four intact classes were randomly assigned to four different conditions: processing instruction (PI), textual input enhancement (TE), consciousness-raising (C-R), and control (CO). A pretest/posttest (immediate and delayed) design was used, where participants’ ability to interpret and produce the target structure was assessed through administering a multiple choice interpretation test and a sentence-level production test. Moreover, a grammaticality judgment test was run to assess the amount of intake. Results revealed that learners in the PI group significantly outperformed learners in the other groups on both immediate/delayed production posttests. The findings also indicated that, C-R group could not retain the significant effect of instruction on delayed production posttest and TE tasks were not effective in improving the learners’ production of the target structure. Moreover, the PI group outperformed the other groups on grammaticality judgment test too. Based on these findings, we can conclude that PI which encompasses the most outstanding features of both focus on form and meaning instruction might be a more effective approach in helping EFL learners to acquire the target grammatical forms.

Despite their widespread popularity and rapid growth, the Internet-mediated English educational materials for learners of English as a foreign/second language (FL/SL) have rarely been analyzed in terms of their potential hidden curriculum. Accordingly, the present study aims to address this need through conducting a CDA investigation into some lessons which are randomly selected from an English educational website called “Englishcentral.” Adapting, expanding, and adopting some elements of Van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social Actor Network, the researchers attempt to describe and explain the representation of “Iran” in Englishcentral. Investigating and thematizing the research data revealed that the keyword “Iran” was used in this website to refer to three groups of social actors, namely the Iranian government and officials, Iranian people, and Iranian people and/or government/officials. The way these social actors are associated and dissociated, activated and passivated, personalized and impersonalized creates remarkable findings which give support to the presence of particular hidden agenda in this program. In all, the results of this study reveal that the Iranian social actors are portrayed unfavorably in Englishcentral, which is an alleged English educational program.

Teachers’ sense of efficacy belief has been introduced as a context-specific construct, but the related literature is not clear on this specificity. This study was an attempt to show how contextual factors influence efficacy beliefs among English language teachers. To this end, thirty Iranian EFL teachers working in both school and private institute contexts were chosen as the participants to respond to Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Beliefs questionnaire (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001) twice: once based on school context and once based on private institute context. Afterwards, the participants were invited to a brief interview designed to investigate further the reasons for which they had scored higher in either context. The interview findings and the results of a t-test revealed that context really made a difference. It is argued that the proper or improper functioning of efficacy building sources is the cause of the difference

Reading comprehension ability consists of multiple cognitive processes, and cloze tests have long been claimed to measure this ability as a whole. However, since the introduction of cloze test, different varieties of it have been proposed by the testers. Thus, the present study was an attempt to examine the relatedness of Cloze-Elide test, Multiple-choice (MC) cloze test, and C-test as three different types of cloze procedure used for measuring reading comprehension. To this end, one C-test consisting of four short texts, one fixed ratio (n=7) multiple-choice cloze test, and one cloze-elide test were prepared from reading passages with similar readability levels. The participants of the study were 30 (male &female) freshman university students majoring in English literature. The results of ANOVA test showed that there were not any statistically significant differences at the 0.05 level of significance among the performance of the students on the three tests measuring their reading comprehension. Therefore, it was concluded that against the advocates of each test who claim superiority of it over the other types, these three types of cloze tests in this study assessed the reading comprehension in a similar way. So, the testers can be confident to make use of these tests as reading comprehension tests interchangeably.

این مطالعه موردی به بررسی این موضوع می پردازد که یک معلم تایوانی که در یک دوره ی کارشناسی ارشد آموزش زبان شرکت کرده است چگونه از زبانشناسی ساختارمند- نقش گرا و آموزش سبک محور در طراحی و آموزش زبان به فراگیران زبان انگلیسی در تایوان استفاده کرده است. با استفاده از روش مدت دار قوم شناسی، نتیجه این تحقیق نشان داد که برداشت و تصور این معلم از دستور زبان از دیدی سنتی، محدود به جمله و متمرکز بر ساختار به فهمی کاربردی تر از ارتباطات پیوسته مابین سبک و ویژگی های متن تغییر قابل توجهی کرد. این تغییر زمانی رخ داد که معلم توانست از زبانشناسی ساختارمند- نقش گرا برای فهم عملکرد زبان در ادبیات کودکان استفاده کند. با این وجود، میزان توانایی این معلم برای استفاده از زبانشناسی ساختارمند- نقش گرا و آموزش سبک محور در تمرینات کلاس تا حدی تحت تاثیر چارچوب برنامه ریزی شده ی اجباری تدریس و آزمون های رایج در مکانی بود که وی پس از بازگشت به تایوان در آن مشغول به کار شد. این تحقیق بیشتر در ایجاد فهمی جدید از دستور زبان در آموزش زبان انگلیسی و تربیت معلمان بهتر در آسیا کاربرد دارد.

The current study was intended to investigate the impact of Dynamic Assessment (DA) on promoting reading comprehension ability of Iranian male and female EFL learners, focusing on Guthke's Lerntest approach. In this study, the researcher used DA which unifies instruction with assessment to provide learners with mediation to promote their hidden potential during assessment. In this action research project, Guthke's Lerntest approach was used to develop the reading comprehension skill classes that integrated mediation with assessment to support 60 Iranian EFL learners' reading skill. The Guthke's lerntest approach and the mediation design are presented in detail in this article. The participants' reading scores are presented to show the effect of Guthke's Lerntest approach on promoting Iranian EFL learners' reading performance. In addition, the participants' pre and post-test scores were compared to determine whether the participants revealed significant progress after receiving Guthke's Lerntest approach in reading comprehension setting. The findings showed that participants of experimental group significantly outperformed the one in the static way. In conclusion, the results of the study revealed that employing the Guthke's Lerntest approach can offer a new condition to enhance the EFL learners' reading comprehension ability and that doing research in this field can be beneficial for EFL learners, English instructors and other researchers in other fields. 

The post methods era has witnessed a dramatic change inapproaches to and methods of teaching as well as testing. At the heart of such a change, collaborative learning has received top priority and testing domain has actually gone under scrutiny. This new mode of education has made stakeholders, especially in higher education; reflect on an interactive e-assessment based instruction. Such a cyber-based environment provides immersive and authentic learning, mixed with a type of e-assessment task, no longer functioning like a summative test but it has become learning and teaching tool. The present research study intends to shed some lights on the characteristics of an e-assessment-based App in a descriptive format on one hand, and its viability in an exploratory design on the other, with emphasis on e-assessment at its core for teaching ESAP- English Specially for Academic Purposes- while instruction and assessment of language skills and sub skills are included. The descriptive and exploratory design of the study highlights the mode of interactivity inherent in this App, which provides a chance for learners to explore, make errors and construct meaning/solutions to their problems via hyperlinks in the created App.