درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This qualitative study aims to investigate the sources of burnout from Iranian EFL teachers’ perspectives. To this end, thirty-four Iranian male and female EFL teachers participated in the semi-structured interview to comment on the burnout sources and then rank them in terms of priority. Also, one hundred teachers responded to an online open-ended questionnaire. The coding scheme revealed two external and internal nodes, five themes, and fifteen subthemes. Under the external node lay financial, organizational, and teacher training problems. The internal node involved teachers’ psycho-affective traits and personal life affairs. The results showed that external sources outweighed the internal ones. Among the external sources, teachers’ low pay, the supervisor’s maltreatment, and workload, and among the internal ones, teachers’ low problem-solving abilities, low motivation and self-efficacy held high ranks. No one attributed burnout to teachers’ gender and age, and almost all participants unanimously criticized the educational administration system of Iran for not providing teachers with the necessary means of burnout recognition and prevention. The study has implications for educational policymakers and practitioners.

Although listening is a crucial skill to enhance one’s position in academia, this skill is challenging for most L2 learners. The first step to improve L2 learners’ listening skill is to figure out their listening problems and to provide them with appropriate instruction. The aim of the current study was told-fold: (1) It explored Iranian intermediate L2 learners’ listening problems, and (2) it examined the effect of metacognitive strategies’ instruction on Iranian intermediate L2 learners’ listening comprehension. Participants were a random sample of 31 intermediate L2 learners in Iran. The Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was administered to the participants to check their homogeneity. Also, the participants’ listening comprehension was pretested. After 10 treatment sessions, the participants were posttested to check the (possible) changes in their listening comprehension ability. In order to check the participants’ listening problems, they filled Liu’s (2010) Listening Comprehension Processing Problems Questionnaire. Data were analyzed through one samples<em> t test</em> and paired samples <em>t test</em>, whose results indicated that metacognitive strategies elevated the participants’ ability in terms of listening. Results revealed that the participants had problems in the steps of parsing and perception, although the problems were not significant. On the other hand, in the utilization phase, there seemed to be no problem. As a result, applying the findings of this research will help materials developers, curriculum planners, instructional decision-makers, and teachers.

To address the potential of the incorporating of output-based tasks, this quasi-experimental research compared the impact of two kinds of output tasks, namely dictogloss and editing text, on the development of grammatical knowledge of Iranian EFL learners. The study sample consisted 24 female learners studying at the high-school level in Iranshahr, Sistan and Balouchestan Province. They were divided into three groups, each containing 8 participants. The groups under the study were the control group, dictogloss group, and text editing group. The target structure was the passive voice. T-test and post hoc Tukey were utilized for the analysis of the data. The study results advocated the superiority of experimental groups over the control group. Moreover, it was shown that there are no statically significant differences between dictogloss and text editing groups in terms of grammatical development. It was concluded that output-based tasks in the form of dictogloss and editing tasks are beneficial in enhancing the grammatical knowledge of Iranian EFL learners regarding passive voice. 

The present article experimentally studied the impact of mindfulness-cultivating intervention on various dimensions of learning. The mindfulness-cultivation techniques employed in the experimental group involved observance of all experience, analyzing, planning, judging, reasoning, and fantasizing (van Vreeswijk, et al., 2014). Furthermore, Pirson et al.’s (2012) contention that mindfulness encompasses four facets of attributes:; novelty producing, novelty seeking, engagement, and flexibility informed the selection of techniques. Learners’ level of proficiency was checked before the treatment. Before and after the treatment, three questionnaires were employed: 1) Langer Mindfulness Scale 2) Reflective thinking questionnaire 3) Positivity Scale. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) results demonstrated, approximately 50 percent of variance in reflective thinking was predicted by these techniques. Furthermore, the results via independent samples t -test demonstrated that positive orientation and language achievement promoted in the experimental group, thus implying that the intervention executed in the experimental group was effective in enhancing these two factors as well.

Combining Bachman’s (1990) conceptualization of content validity with Messick’s (1989) unifying model of construct validity, this study attempted to fill the gap in researching content validation in the context of a university reading achievement test by (a) examining traditional content validity evidence and (b) analyzing the test scores to either back-up or rebut the evidence and explore the construct of the underlying test structure. On a sample of 477 third-year English-majored test takers at a Central Vietnamese University (CVU), the study was conducted in the pre-test stage where the test content was compared with the test specification and the post-test stage where the test scores were processed via Rasch and CFA competing model analyses. Results showed that while content relevance was satisfactory and the test construct was to a large extent not threatened by construct-irrelevant variance, content coverage of the test remained problematic with instances of construct underrepresentation. Moreover, the study supported the one-factor model of general reading ability as the underlying structure of the reading achievement test over the correlated three sub-skill and higher-order factor models. The study bears implications for both test writers in designing and test takers in performing the L2 reading test.

The increasing popularity of self-assessment prompted several scholars to investigate its effectiveness and accuracy in relation to teacher assessment. However, most of these studies focused only on the consistency estimate perspective. Thus, the current study investigated the interrater reliability between self- and teacher assessment of students’ oral performance in Filipino. Specifically, this study used two perspectives (i.e., consistency estimate and consensus estimate perspectives) to see the full picture of interrater reliability between self- and teacher assessment. Fifty (50) college students from various specializations participated in this study. They assessed their respective oral performances using an in-class observation self-assessment with self-viewing. Findings reveal that teacher and students’ SA results posted a very strong positive relationship and that their ratings agree with each other. High positive correlations suggest that both the students and the teacher consistently apply the rating scale. These results were attributed to the use of a micro-analytic rating scale, assessment training, and rating procedure used during SA. Implications for classroom assessment and future studies were discussed.

Teaching practices are believed to be a determining factor in educational systems. For over two decades, the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Iran has been organizing Top Model Teaching Festivals to address the changes required to promote English teachers' professional development. Considering the high amounts of investment in such programs and their impacts on teaching and sustainable learning, this study probed into how the award-winning teachers critically view and evaluate the efficacy of such nationwide festivals. To this end, ten award-winning EFL teachers in the festivals were interviewed using a semi-structured interview protocol to qualitatively elicit their attitudes towards the program. The results obtained from the content analysis of the interview transcripts revealed that such festivals have not adequately fulfilled their main objective, which is to improve the teaching quality and potential of teachers and promote their professional development. Thus, the study calls for a reassessment of the effectiveness of such programs to find alternative ways for empowering teachers.       

Emotional words are assumed to have a processing advantage over neutral words due to their emotional content. Meanwhile, this advantage depends on other word features such as frequency and the characteristics of the processor and context of learning. Accordingly, the current study investigated the simultaneous impacts of L2 words’ emotional valence and frequency, and L2 user’s gender on word recognition time in a natural reading context. 43 intermediate EFL learners read 36 sentences in a coherent text for comprehension while their eye movements were recorded by eye-tracker. The findings revealed that participants processed the positive, negative, and neutral words identically based on eye fixation time. However, the frequency effect was attained for both valenced and neutral words. Also, no significant gender differences were approved in terms of recognition time though male participants tended to process all word types slightly faster than female ones. The lack of processing difference between valenced and neutral words is attributed to the disembodiment of L2 emotional words and learning experience of the participants as late EFL learners. These learners have been deprived of affective socialization and the affective sensory experience in their development of L2 emotional words. The absence of valence/frequency interaction is attributed to the L1/L2 relationship in terms of the target words. Although witnessed gender effect did not reach a significance level, it is suggested that the processing of emotional words be viewed in a multidimensional framework where the characteristics of the word, the processor, and the learning context are taken into account

This small-scale corpus-based study delineates the most common and significant dialectal variations between the two most commonly spoken English varieties: American English (AmE) and British English (BrE). As a result of the corpus analysis, four main areas have emerged as to where dialectal variations take place: pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and orthography/punctuation. A total of 26 variations ( f =10 in pronunciation, f =5 in vocabulary, f =6 grammar, and f =5 in orthography/punctuation) was identified by analyzing a variety of sources, including books, articles, online dictionaries, and websites. The significance of the variations in the abovementioned language areas and their implications for language teaching were discussed empirically and pedagogically. Notwithstanding the limitations, the research is expected to contribute to our understanding and awareness of the dialectal variations and assist language learners and teachers with the learning and teaching of these variations pedagogically and systematically since it might serve as a guide or a framework of reference.