درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Despite a currently proliferating interest in the second language (L2) willingness to communicate (WTC), much less has investigated Asian high school students’ beliefs about L2 teachers’ strategies to encourage WTC inside the classroom. This qualitative study explores the strategies employed by Vietnamese EFL teachers to encourage their students’ WTC inside the classroom and students’ beliefs about their teachers’ strategies. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with seven teachers and eight students. Results revealed that the teachers employed six main strategy groups, namely grouping, warm-up, topic choice, correction strategies, class atmosphere, and motivational strategies. Also, the students indicated their preferences for some strategies and suggested other strategies which they believed to be effective. They expressed expectations and suggested ways to improve their teachers’ strategies to encourage WTC inside the classroom. The students’ preferences and recommendations of strategies reflected contextual factors. As WTC is a context-sensitive construct, it might be necessary for L2 teachers to understand their students’ beliefs to foster L2 WTC effectively inside the classroom.

As a result of the advent of the COVID-19 outbreak, online assessments are being implemented in universities and schools worldwide. Nevertheless, regardless of the extensive use of online assessments, many researchers have proposed several barriers to the effective application of this form of examination in different language learning contexts. A combined qualitative and quantitative methodological approach was used to investigate 154 Iranian English language learners’ opinions of the relative benefits of online examinations in terms of pedagogy, validity, reliability, affective factors, practicality, and security during the COVID- 19 pandemic. To this end, an electronic questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were employed. This study identified online assessment as having significant benefits over traditional, paper-based examinations, comprising accessibility, using cutting-edge technology, providing immediate feedback, automated grading, creating a question bank, and long-term efficiency in terms of time, effort, and costs. Nevertheless, many challenges have been identified by students while successfully implementing online exams regarding validity and reliability, emotional and security issues.

The present study, adopting a mixed-methods design, aimed to compare three types of task instruction entailing translation-based, meaning-based, and hint-based instructions for vocabulary acquisition. In so doing, a pool of 45 male Iranian intermediate L2 learners, which were divided into three groups, participated in the study based on convenient sampling. The treatment phase lasted for 20 sessions, allocating the last 45 minutes of each class to teaching vocabulary. Each class was exposed to a different treatment taking the experimental condition it was assigned into account. The treatment consisted of two tasks. The results obtained from one-way ANOVA confirmed that there was a statistically significant difference in learners’ vocabulary scores for the three sets of scores. Moreover, following the coding reliability and agreement, 12 common themes emerged from the students’ responses to the semi-structured interview questions. At the end, the study offers some practical implications for L2 learners and teachers.

Since teachers’ creative behavior or innovation-promoting inclination affects the quality of education, some recent studies have aimed to explore teachers’ willingness to practice teaching for creativity (TfC) in various education contexts. As an attempt to identify the correlates of TfC, the aim of this research was to test a model of model of TfC in EFL contexts based on teachers’ creative self-efficacy and their growth mindset. A number of 472 Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers partook in this survey as the participants. The electronic versions of the questionnaires for the three latent variables were administered to the participants. Structural equation modelling was utilized to test the suggested model of TfC in the EFL context. The results indicated that both teachers’ creative self-efficacy and their growth mindset substantially influenced EFL teachers’ TfC although the contribution of creative self-efficacy was greater than. Additionally, teachers’ growth mindset had a slight effect on their creative self-efficacy. These findings can offer remarkable implications for EFL teacher educators

Today, technological applications provide language learners with many possibilities to improve their learning. Online learning environments create opportunities for more flexibility, interaction, and collaboration in a way different from face-to-face learning environments. This study attempted to investigate the effects of synchronous distance education on the oral comprehension of Iraqi English language learners. The participants were 19 Iraqi English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in a language institute in Karbala, Iraq. All learners were following the same language course at the B1 level. These learners were randomly divided into three groups: the face-to-face control group, the experimental group taught via the Adobe Connect platform, and the experimental group taught via the Skype application. The data were collected through pre- and post-oral proficiency tests. The findings showed significant differences in the improvement of oral comprehension among the three groups. Experimental groups scored significantly higher than the control group. Moreover, the results indicated that the Adobe Connect-based instruction had a better effect on the learners’ oral comprehension in comparison to the Skype-based instruction. Concerning the performance of males and females in the experimental groups, the findings showed a significant difference between females and males in the Adobe Connect condition, with females showing more improvement. However, no significant difference was observed between males and females in the Skype group. The study stresses the mediation of virtual classrooms in enhancing EFL learners’ learning achievements. Relevant pedagogical implications for classroom practice in EFL education are presented and discussed and some suggestions are made for future research

Emotion labor is defined as any conflict between institutional demands and teachers’ professional beliefs and preferences. Engaging in emotion labor is an inevitable aspect of becoming a language teacher. Scholars agree that language teacher agency and identity are closely tied to emotion labor. This fact particularly looms large for novice language teachers, who tend to perceive contradictions between what they imagine prior to entering the profession and what they actually experience in their teaching contexts. This case study applied activity theory (Engeström, 2015) and Gee’s (2000) identity framework to explore how the emotion labor experienced by a novice Iranian female teacher of English as a foreign language (EFL) over a five-year career period at three private language institutes affected her language teacher agency and identity. The findings, obtained from class observations and semi-structured interviews, highlight two major sources of emotion labor: 1) profit-oriented policy, and 2) performance-constraining factors within the institute, which caused the participant to contemplate quitting her job. Implications and further research are discussed in line with the interplay among emotion labor, language teacher identity, and well-being.