درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The field of ELT is constantly witnessing the introduction of new instructional approaches: one such perhaps recent initiative is critical discourse analysis (CDA). Accordingly, the present study was an attempt to investigate the impact of CDA instruction on Iranian EFL learners’ descriptive and argumentative writing ability. To fulfill the aforementioned purpose, a sample TOEFL was primarily piloted among a group of 30 upper intermediate EFL learners by the researchers; with the acceptable reliability and item analysis indices achieved, then the researchers administered the test among another group of 90 upper intermediate learners. Ultimately, those 60 learners whose scores fell one standard deviation above and below the mean were chosen as the participants of the study and were randomly assigned to a control and an experimental group with 30 participants in each. Both of these groups underwent the same amount of teaching time during 20 sessions which included a treatment of CDA instruction based on Jank’s (2005) set of 14 features for the experimental group. A posttest was administered at the end of the instruction to both groups and their mean scores on the test were compared through a multivariate analysis of variance. The result (F = 14.41 and p = 0.000 < 0.05) led to the rejection of the two null hypotheses raised in this study, thereby demonstrating that the learners in the experimental group benefited significantly more than those in the control group in terms of improving their descriptive and argumentative writing ability. Hence, the major pedagogical implication of this study is that CDA instruction can be effectively used to assist EFL learners improve their argumentative and descriptive writing ability.

ELT has recently witnessed a shift away from a method-bound orientation and toward a post-methodic view of teaching English. Consequently, the focus of some second language teacher education programs has shifted toward sociopolitical aspects of ELT (Miller, 2004) and its contributions to reinforcement or transformation of the status quo (Kumaravadivelu, 2003a). Yet, in many countries, including Iran, ELT teacher education has maintained a relatively method-bound focus on technical dimensions of teaching English and has avoided adopting a critical and sociopolitical approach to ELT. In order to investigate the ways in which teacher education as currently practiced facilitates or stifles implementation of postmethod in ELT, the present study explored English teachers’ perceptions of the dominant approaches to teacher education in ELT centers in Iran and their ideological and pedagogical bases. To this end, 23 language teachers were interviewed about the logistics, content, and procedures of the teacher education programs they had attended. The analysis of the interviews, as directed by grounded theory, yielded three themes, namely no/little teacher learners’ involvement in course design and implementation, dominance of a transmission model, and dominance of a linguistic and technical focus