درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Recent studies within the past four decades have confirmed the effectiveness of Student-Centered Learning (SCL) over Teacher-Centered Learning (TCL). Furthermore, the emergence of 21st-century learning skills and competencies necessitates education systems to change their previous practices and equip their students with these skills and competencies. However, implementing SCL has not gained considerable attention among education authorities and EFL teachers in Iranian high schools. This study aims to explore EFL teachers' understanding of SCL and their perceptions of the obstacles to implementing it in Kermanshah, Iran. To this end, the study employed a convergent mixed-methods design that combined 24-item questionnaire data with 9 structured interviews using the NVIVO Software Version10. The questionnaire analysis revealed that there is a wide gap between the participants’ perceptions of SCL and their practices in the classroom. Moreover, the analysis of the interviews led to extracting three main themes of institutional, teacher-student-parent, and socio-cultural obstacles that impede implementing SCL in EFL classes and indicate that TCL practices are still running. The results revealed that teachers hold general perceptions of SCL. However, due to some constraints, they adhere to the TCL.            

Speaking and listening are essential language skills used as a measure for evaluating the students’ proficiency level. These skills receive more importance in the Iranian new educational curriculum by the publication of new English book series. However, as noticed in some of the classes, the purpose of mastering oral language abilities is not efficiently fulfilled. Accordingly, the present collaborative action research aimed to firstly identify the reasons underlying students’ inability to perform oral skills in order to do the online activities in classes and secondly provide some suggestions to solve the existing problem. The study was conducted in a junior high school in Marand, Iran. The participants included 36 female 9th-grade students, who met on the Shad application and were selected based on convenience sampling. Class observations, interviews, and students’ performance in language tasks were used to collect the required data. Gaming was implemented as the selected solution in a separate class planned for focused speaking and listening activities. More specifically, sentence-expanding games on different levels (adding words to a simple sentence to expand it and also adding sentences to the initiating sentence and making a short story) were used as the main methods in these sessions. The findings from the descriptive statistics indicated an improvement in students’ motivation and engagement in speaking activities, as well as their accuracy in making sentences. They also showed positive attitudes toward the use of these game-based tasks in EFL classes. The study provides practical implications for materials developers and language teachers.

This synthesis reviews the methodological issues in empirical studies investigating the effect of working memory capacity (WMC) on relative clause ambiguity resolution where results have failed to be consistent cross-linguistically and even intra-linguistically. This discrepancy might have occurred due to ‘methodological inconsistencies’ in the design (Liu & Brown, 2015), administration, and scoring of WMC measures. This study aimed to investigate the aggregative and developmental status of the methodological practices of WMC measures and describe how transparently such practices have been reported. Based on a comprehensive search, 39 experiments were retrieved from 25 studies, culminating in a collection of studies with a time span of 22 years from 1999 to 2021, and coded for 46 features. Results revealed that although over the past 22 years, the field has witnessed significant improvements in the employment of WMC tests, there are still a lot of variations and inconsistencies calling for attempts to raise methodological awareness among researchers to afford more attention to quality and transparency in reporting WMC tests. The article concludes with a call for reform in standardizing WMC tests and a number of other recommendations for future primary and secondary research.

Despite extensive studies concerning written error correction, it is imperative that more research be conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of error correction on improving L2 writing. Driven by this gap, this study aimed to examine whether unfocused direct and indirect types of written corrective feedback had any impact on the writing accuracy of the Iranian English language learners’ new compositions. Through the random matching technique, ninety Iranian English language learners from seven foreign language centers in southwestern Iran were split into two groups for treatment and one group for control. As part of the evaluation, a writing test was utilized to determine whether the learners had improved their writing accuracy due to the treatment. The results showed that the participants in both treatment groups improved their writing accuracy, though the learning gains from both treatment were not significantly different. This study concludes with some implications for teachers regarding their use of appropriate types of written error correction. 

The present study strived to determine the degree to which collaborative tasks and EFL learners’ gender affected their flow experiences. To this end, first, the researchers selected 56 intermediate-level EFL learners in two intact classrooms at a private language institute in Urmia (Iran) as the participants. Second, they randomly assigned the classes to an experimental group and a control group. Third, they used a flow state questionnaire to determine the participants’ flow experiences prior to the onset of the study. Fourth, they provided the experimental group with collaborative language learning treatment during 12 sessions. Nonetheless, they deprived the control group of this treatment. Finally, they administered the flow state questionnaire to the groups anew to appraise the efficacy of collaborative tasks for augmenting the participants’ flow experiences. The results indicated that the above-mentioned tasks had an advantageous impact on the EFL learners’ flow state of mind. Furthermore, based on the results, female learners’ flow experiences were more positively affected by the collaborative tasks in comparison with the male learners’ flow experiences. The obtained results may empower the teacher educators, syllabus designers, and researchers to take account of the flow state of mind during the process of language acquisition.

Despite the determining role of culture-bound materials in the enhancement of EFL learners’ productive skills, a scarcity of investigation on the influence of culture-oriented content on their productive skills is staunchly perceived. This gap can be partly filled by implementing Content Based Language Teaching (CBLT) program which contrives the EFL content especially in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classrooms. In this respect, a culture-oriented EAP course book was designed based on Tomlinson’s (2001) materials development framework. A total of 100 participants were recruited according to their language proficiency results, and were fractionated into two productive EAP task groups embracing Oral Presentation and Systematic Writing as the two befitting techniques to strengthen productive skills. After practicing and teaching the developed course book in each class in twenty treatment sessions, the participants were given a posttest. Correspondingly, a paired samples t-test indicated that culture-oriented content affected the EFL students’ speaking and writing skills separately. Similarly, an independent samples t-test revealed the influence of culture-oriented content on their speaking skill than the writing skill. The findings suggest the significance of the first culture as the benchmark for incorporating second culture contents in EFL teaching arenas.

This quantitative study aimed to investigate Iranian EFL student teachers’ perceptions on the use of Machine Translation (MT) for foreign language learning in academic context. To this end, 107 EFL student teachers from a women-only state university in Tehran, Iran, completed a recently developed and validated questionnaire in the field. The findings revealed that most participants were familiar with digital technology including MT and its different types such as Google Translate (GT). Satisfied with MT output, the majority of the participants in the study installed MT apps on their smartphones or used its website on their computers to complete assignments or to translate from Persian to English and vice versa. However, they were neutral about whether their instructors confirmed their MT use, or whether they preferred their teachers know they use MT or not. They were also not sure whether consulting MT was against the regulations. The results showed that authorities in the field of foreign language teaching are required to take a positive stand on this emerging technology; in addition, considering the importance of training for both instructors and learners, they should hold workshops for more responsible and effective MT implementation. 

This study intended to explore the effect of Augmented Reality (AR) on lowering foreign language anxiety (FLA) in adult Iranian EFL learners. To this end, a triangulation study including a quasi-experimental pre-test post-test design in the first phase, and an oral interview in the second phase was designed and implemented. Forty adult Iranian EFL learners took part in the quantitative study and were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The authors developed and delivered the AR-infused materials through the Zappar application, an AR platform. The treatment involved the conventional language teaching method for the control and the AR-integrated one for the experimental group for 20 sessions. The anxiety level of learners in both groups was assessed before and after the treatment to check for any effects. Data on participants’ FLA has been gathered through Horwitz’s (1986) Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Survey (FLCAS) questionnaire and analyzed via ANCOVA in SPSS. Also, the participants in the experimental group were interviewed at the end of the experiment to provide feedback on their AR-integrated language learning experience. Results revealed that AR did not affect learners’ foreign language anxiety levels. Also, some learners found it not very relaxing and easy to use. This could be attributed to the novelty of the experience and the cognitive load imposed on learners. The study’s outcomes were in contrast to several previous research findings; however, since research in this area is still in its infancy, more research should be done on the impact of AR on language education.