درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Teachers serving at the front lines of education during difficult times of the pandemic seem to have been forgotten in these bustling days around the world. While delivery of high-quality education is on the shoulders of these people, their life and wellbeing have been affected as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic; however, there is little documented evidence on how the pandemic has impacted language teachers’ wellbeing. To fill this gap, this qualitative study examines the wellbeing of English as a Foreign Language teachers in Iranian public schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ten participants who attended in-depth interviews were found to have their wellbeing levels severely affected by the pandemic. Indeed, the newly emerged challenges have been added to the existing obstacles and augmented the already stressful teaching profession. Based on the findings, recommendations are provided for authorities and parents to be employed during the pandemic and afterward to help teachers flourish and subsequently improve quality education.

This study aimed at investigating the effect of reading-based vs. discussion-based pre-writing activities on the writing ability of Iranian EFL learners. To this end, a quasi-experimental study was conducted with 40 Iranian intermediate EFL learners within16 to 20 age range who were selected based on their performance on an Oxford Solution Proficiency Test. They were divided into two experimental groups: Reading Group and Discussion Group. The former group was made to involve in some reading activity prior to doing the main writing task, and the latter group was made to participate in a discussion activity before the main writing task. After the treatment for 10 sessions, both groups were post-tested. The pre-test and post-test involved free compositions, which were scored analytically. The findings indicated that both groups’ writing ability improved over the course of the study, but the difference between the performances of the groups on the post-test was not statistically significant, although the Reading group’s mean score was greater than the Discussion group. The results of this study have some implications for students, language teachers, syllabus designers and material developers.

In recent years, the personal characteristics and attitudes of teachers have attracted the attention of various scholars. The teacher’s immunity level is one of the newly proposed concepts in this area. The present study aimed at exploring the difference between the immunity level of the Iranian EFL teachers at language centers and public schools. In order to achieve this objective, one hundred EFL teachers teaching in public schools (N = 50) and language centers (N = 50), in Isfahan, were selected through convenience sampling to participate in this study. Then, the Teachers’ Immunity Level questionnaire was administered to them, and they were interviewed as well.  The obtained results revealed that teachers working in public schools have higher levels of immunity compared to the ones working in language centers. This finding can have some implications for the decision-makers in the Iranian Ministry of Education to provide adequate amenities to improve teachers’ immunity in language centers.

Many difficulties learners experience during language learning interfere with their performance, and those associated with their psychology play an integral role in this process. Underpinned by Bandura’s social cognitive theory and Dweck’s implicit theory of intelligence, this article explored how language mindsets influenced female EFL learners’ cognitive engagement through the mediation of risk-taking. Following a quantitative design and drawing on stratified sampling, the researchers ran the Power Analysis Calculator and selected 384 language learners from six institutes of Tabriz, Iran. The data were collected by three questionnaires, including the Language Mindset Inventory of Lou and Noels (2017), University Student Engagement Inventory (USEI) designed by Maroco et al., (2016), and the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS) of Patton, Stanford and Barratt (1995). The PLS-SEM analysis showed that learners’ growth mindsets were directly related to cognitive engagement. Furthermore, risk-taking significantly mediated this relationship. This finding provides some implications for school psychology to develop in students self-theories that highlight growth and competence instead of limitation and inactivity.

This study is a mixed-methods parallel design aiming at exploring the perception of 49 ESP teachers toward formative classroom assessment with regard to their language assessment literacy (LAL) in Iran within the theoretical framework of Hay and Penney (2013). The data were collected through an online semi-structured interview and a questionnaire, extracted from Shahzamani and Tahririan's (2021) questionnaire, consisting of 13 Likert items and 9 open-ended questions which were validated for this study through confirmatory factor analysis. The results of a Chi-square test on the Likert items showed a significant difference between the participant’s responses to each item which revealed an overall tendency of the ESP teachers toward employing formative assessment as an efficient way for evaluating their own teaching efficacy, the quality of the teaching materials, and their students' progress. The results also revealed that the two features of 1) ability to assess learners based on cultural-related issues in a certain context, and 2) ability to design suitable assessment methods for multilevel ESP classes should be added to the components of LAL in the existing literature. The results have implications for teacher educators to consider these two features in teacher education programs. Also, academic authorities are to notice that reliance on summative assessment and evaluation merely based on final exam scores are not appreciated by most ESP teachers.           

Teacher autonomy and teacher personality, both affecting teaching and learning processes, were focused on in this gender-comparative study. The required data was gathered through convenience sampling by online distributing two sets of questionnaires, which were responded by 156 Iranian EFL teachers, including both males and females. Then, SPSS-26 was used to analyze the data in this quantitative correlational survey to answer the two research questions, and the results indicated that a) among the five sub-constructs of personality traits, the Extraversion construct stayed on the first place according to its correlation degree to teacher autonomy, which was assessed very strong; b) male teachers naturally felt more sense of autonomy than females did; also, they are more extraverted, open, and conscientious than female teachers. Finally, Self-Determination Theory (SDT) was applied to support the acquired results. This survey can be best suited for EFL teachers to become more sensitive about their personality constructs.

Cross-linguistic influence is a documented cause of errors committed by second language learners. Since Talmy (2000) proposed two categories to classify languages of the world regarding their preferred lexicalization patterns of a literal motion event, known as verb-framed and satellite-framed languages, the effect of typological properties of the first language on second language acquisition specifically in the domain of motion expressions has been subject to extensive scrutiny. The present research examines whether the typological properties of Persian (L1) and English (L2) affect adult second language acquisition, particularly in the spatial domain comparing controls (English and Persian native speakers). To this end, three groups (every 25 members) of participants were asked to watch 12 short animated cartoons representing voluntary motion carried out in vertical and trajectory directions. The participants’ descriptions were recorded and analyzed regarding information density, semantic focus, and semantic locus of utterances. The findings of the research revealed that in spite of different lexicalization patterns to encode manner in English and Persian, Persian learners of English across two levels of proficiency, do not face challenges to lexicalize motion components in English, but they produce utterances with low density which is the typical way of focusing on spatial components in their native language, suggesting that the challenge learners face encoding motion events was not a linguistic issue, but rather a cognitive one. Persian learners’ use of English motion expressions regarding information density was more aligned with that of English motion expressions as they advanced to a higher proficiency level.         

The present study sought to find the most frequent lexical bundles, particularly the token of the bundles, in the introduction and discussion sections of Civil Engineering research articles. It also aimed to examine the forms or types of lexical bundles found in the introduction and discussion sections of the articles. To this end, a quantitative analysis was performed on the use of two-to-five-word lexical bundles, followed by a qualitative analysis of their functions and structures based on the structural taxonomy of lexical bundles proposed by Biber, Conrad, and Cortes (2004). AntConc, as a corpus analysis tool, was employed for the extraction of lexical bundles as well as the examination of their types and tokens. Likewise, concordancers and word and keyword frequency generators were used for the analysis of word clusters and lexical bundles.   A total of 790 lexical bundles in the introduction section and 279 lexical bundles in the discussion section were analyzed based on a set of pre-established criteria (e.g., the frequency cut-off of 20 per million words) . The findings revealed that the lexical bundles consisted largely of two-word strings, and the five-word strings were the fewest. Regarding the structural classification of bundles, phrasals were the most frequent ones, whereas clausal on es were the least frequent ones. The study carries important implications, especially for materials developers and course designers who may hopefully benefit from the results in designing EAP materials finely tailored to the linguistic needs of Civil Engineering students.

Perhaps the degree of test difficulty is one of the most significant characteristics of a test. However, no empirical research on the difficulty of the MSRT test has been carried out. The current study attempts to fill the gap by utilizing a two-parameter item response model to investigate the psychometric properties (item difficulty and item discrimination) of the MSRT test. The Test Information Function (TIF) was also figured out to estimate how well the test at what range of ability distinguishes respondents. To this end, 328 graduate students (39.9% men and 60.1% women) were selected randomly from three universities in Isfahan. A version of MSRT English proficiency test was administered to the participants. The results supported the unidimensionality of the components of MSRT test. Analysis of difficulty and discrimination indices of the total test revealed that 14% of the test items were either easy / very easy, 38% were medium, and 48% were either difficult or very difficult. In addition, 14% of the total items were classified as nonfunctioning. They discriminated negatively or did not discriminate at all. 7% of the total items discriminated poorly, 17% discriminated moderately, and 62% discriminated either highly or perfectly, however they differentiated between high-ability and higher-ability test takers. Thus, 38% of the items displayed satisfactory difficulty. Too easy (14%) and too difficult (48%) items could be one potential reason why some items have low discriminating power. An auxiliary inspection of items by the MSRT test developers is indispensable.