درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Shared responsibilities such as mentoring, instruction, learner monitoring and classroom management enable the peers to observe, review, reflect on and learn from the overall practical professional expertise of one another through collegial instruction experience. The present exploratory case study has The present exploratory case study has attempted to study collegial teaching as an innovative instruction model (as an alternative to solo-based instruction models) in a General Business English course in SAPco (An automotive part supplier in Iran). To this end, the researcher has mainly tried to concentrate on two expert business English teachers' perceptions concerning their experience of collegial teaching for business English courses, observing their reflections before and after the course, to focus on the possible impacts of this type of instruction on their pedagogical knowledge as language teacher. As a result, as it is indicated in overall reflections of the participant colleagues, collegial instruction is believed to lead toward a more efficient transferability and development of teachers' pedagogical knowledge than what can take place as a result of individually run traditional practices. Moreover, this type of instruction can be a rather cost-effective and timesaving alternative to traditional OJT (on the job training) courses for teacher development authorities and curriculum developers who are concerned about and willing to promote professional development of their teachers.

This article intended to investigate whether the gender-preferential linguistic elements found by Argomon, Koppel, Fine and Shimoni (2003) show the same gender-linked frequencies in applied linguistics research papers written by non-native speakers of English. In so doing, a sample of 32 articles from different journals was collected and the proportion of the targeted features to the whole number of words was calculated. The results indicated that, although the gender-linked patterns of use for many of those features were also observed in our sample, the difference between men and women in the frequency of using those elements was not statistically significant. This non-significant difference shows that either the confinements of genre or those of using a second language or both are keeping L2 writers from expressing their gender to its fullest capacity in the texts they produce.

This study investigatesvariability in English yes/no questions as well as the commonalities among yes/no question variants produced by members of two different varieties of English: Canadian English native speakers and Iranian EFL learners.Further, it probes the role of gender in theEnglish yes/no question variants produced by Canadian English native speakers and those produced by Iranian EFL learners. A modified version of the Edinburgh Map Task was used in data collection. 60 Canadians and Iranians performed the task and made English yes/no question variants considering the informal context. Based on the results, the same types of yes/no question variants were produced by both groups. However, with respect to quantity, Canadians made more variants while the context of use was similar. Another difference noticed was the most frequent variant: Iranians’ frequent variant coincided with the informal context, yet the Canadians’ frequent variant did not. Regarding gender, Iranians did not produce any gender-based variant; while Canadians showed that their production of yes/no question variants was gender-oriented. These findings revealed that both Canadians and Iranians from two different varieties of English syntactically behaved similarly, but their sociolinguistic behavior was not the same.

In the present study, an attempt is made to investigate the frequency and motives of using avoidance strategies by a group of Iranian intermediate language learners through their own journal writing. The effect of gender on the use of avoidance strategies is to be investigated as well. Thirty nine female and twenty three male learners enrolled in an English language spoken course in a private English institute served as the subjects. They were to write freely about their reactions, questions, and their feelings on their endeavor to speak English at the end of each session. One questionnaire was also included to survey the learners overall learning preferences and motivation. Examination and the analysis of the learners’ diaries revealed that using avoidance strategies was due, in turn, to the lack of knowledge, effect of fellow students, stress, lack of confidence, the effect of the teacher, score, and fatigue. Analysis also revealed that females used strategies more frequently than male supporting a number of research done previously on the same area.