درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The aim of this study was to evaluate the new version of Iranian EFL junior high school textbook (Prospect1) from the teachers’ perspectives. The participants included90experienced English teachers (42 females and 48 males) randomly selected from different junior high schools in different districts of Gilan province, Iran. The evaluation of the textbook was conducted quantitatively through a 5-point Likert scale with seven criteria including subject and content, activities, skills, physical layout, practical consideration, language and general criteria. However, it was accompanied by some open-ended questions that solicited teachers' views about each criterion and the book in general. The descriptive statistics including standard deviation, mean, percentage and frequency were used in the data analysis.The findings revealed that teachers have positive perceptions toward this book.They had a positive view about the prospect1 because of its content and topic relevancy to learners' needs, including real life situations, enjoying challenging subject, having communicative pair and group works and attending to four skills equally. However, they intensified some problems in their open ended questions such as insufficiency of teaching time that is 1.5 hour during a week, not focusing on explicit presentation of some words and grammatical points and not paying attention to some sub-skill strategies. These findings can be helpful for curriculum designers and textbook writers to design some valuable textbooks for other levels and to consider correspondence between time of teaching and volume of the book.

The focus of this study is to investigate the comparative effect of teaching grammar through interpretation tasks and pictorial clues on EFL learners’ writing accuracy. The participants were 60 female intermediate EFL learners with age range of 21-35 who were divided into two experimental groups after being homogenized by a piloted PET test. In the piloted researcher-made pre-test, the researcher required the participants to write a narration and also complete another narration with some blanks with provided words using grammatical points they were going to be taught. After the treatment phase, another researcher-made parallel form of the pre-test was administered as the post-tests. To investigate the research question of the study, an ANCOVA was conducted. The results revealed that there was not any significant difference between the performances of either group. In other words, the mentioned ways of teaching grammar had equal effect on the learners’ writing accuracy.

Reflections on the relationship between Iranian ELT researchers and practitioners suggest that research-practice gap has been an endemic feature of our language education programs. This issue has recently become a prime concern for many educational researchers, policy makers and other stakeholders. As such, calls for empirical investigations of measures to be taken in order to improve the relationship between research and practice were made.  The present study was carried out to explore the extent to which English teachers are engaged in doing and reading educational research, and also the barriers that impede them from research engagement. Qualitative interview data were collected from two groups of Iranian teachers: high school teachers, and teachers at private institutes. The analysis of the data revealed low levels of engagement in terms of both reading and doing research. The findings also showed various barriers to research engagement including: barriers related to the production of research, barriers related to the use of research, barriers related to the lack of collaboration between researchers and practitioners, and barriers related to the educational system. The study concluded with a discussion of a set of practical strategies that can be employed in the Iranian ELT context to improve research-practice gap.

Most of the studies on the key word method of second/foreign language vocabulary learning have been based on the evidence from laboratory experiments and have primarily involved the use of English key words to learn the vocabularies of other languages. Furthermore, comparatively quite limited number of such studies is done in authentic classroom contexts. The present study inquired into the effect of using mnemonic key word method of vocabulary instruction on the learning and retention of vocabulary over long term in a normal EFL classroom context.Fifty5th grade primary school students were selected and randomly assigned into experimental and control groups. The experimental group received vocabulary instruction using mnemonic key word method and the control group received classic memorization based instruction of the same vocabulary items. The two groups took three posttests a day, two weeks, and a month after the last treatment session. A MANOVA analysis was run on the data and the results indicated that subjects in the key word group outperformed the memorization group at a significant level in both their learning and retention of the newly learnt vocabularies. The results of the study underscore the efficacy of the establishment of mental links and images for the vocabulary learning and retention of novice and beginning level EFL learners. It further implies that mnemonic devices like key word method should be given prompt attention by both EFL material developers and practitioners as a potentially effective strategy for vocabulary teaching, learning and long term retention at the early stages of second or foreign language development.

هدف این پژوهش تعیین نقش عوامل روان شناسی و جامعه شناسی بطور کلی و ابعاد سرمایه فرهنگی/اجتماعی و شناختی/فراشناختی به صورت جزیی در یادگیری زبان انگلیسی می باشد. بدین منظور، از 143 فراگیر زبان انگلیسی به عنوان زبان خارجی خواسته شد تا آزمون هوش، پرسشنامه فراشناختی، و مقیاس سرمایه فرهنگی و اجتماعی را تکمیل کنند. مدل یابی معادلات ساختاری برای تحلیل داده ها مورد استفاده قرار گرفت. نتایج این پژوهش نشان داد که عوامل روان شناسی و همچنین جامعه شناسی در پیشرفت زبان خارجه نقش دارند، اما سرمایه های فرهنگی و اجتماعی نقش موثرتری در یادگیری زبان انگلیسی دارند. در پایان، نتایج در زمینه یادگیری زبان انگلیسی مورد بحث قرار گرفتند و پیشنهاداتی ارائه شدند.