درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The current study was conducted to investigate the effects of using Microsoft Office Word on Iranian EFL lecturers’ grammar knowledge and their attitudes towards using them to support their grammar knowledge. To this end, 14 Iranian EFL lecturers, who had M.A. degrees in TEFL, containing eight males and six females participated in this study. The participants were randomly divided into equal groups of control and experimental. The participants in the experimental group worked with Microsoft Word and the participants in the control group worked with pens and papers during the study. The participants were asked to write a text about a specific subject and express their opinions about that subject. The results were collected and perused by the help of the supervisor of the study who had a Ph.D. degree in TEFL for checking the possible grammatical errors or mistakes. The results indicated that Microsoft Word was indeed beneficial to the grammar of the participants of experimental group because they got significantly higher grammar scores than the participants of the control group did. The results of this study offer practical implications for applying computer for language teaching and improvement of EFL learners’ writing skill.

Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has stood the test of time as a model of text analysis. The present literature contains a plethora of studies that while taking the ‘clause’ as a unit of analysis have put into investigation the metafunctions in research articles of a single field of study or those of various fields in comparison. Although ‘clause complex’ is another unit of SF analysis, by far there has been only one study on research articles where it was the unit of analysis (Sellami Baklouti, 2011). Therefore, the purpose of this study was to put into analysis the ‘taxis’, ‘expansion’ and ‘projection’ deployed in Applied Linguistics research article abstracts (RAAs) by native (N) and non-native (NN) writers. To this end, 20 Applied Linguistics RAAs (10 by N English writers and 10 by NN English writers on the sub-fields of Discourse Analysis and Language Assessment) were analyzed according to Halliday & Matthiessen’s (2013) ‘clause complex’ framework. The results indicated that there is a significant difference in the use of ‘projection’ by Ns and NNs, while the distribution of ‘taxis’ and ‘expansion’ is the same. The findings also showed what types of ‘taxis’, ‘expansion’ and ‘projection’ were deployed by Ns and NNs

The language register used in academic communities has the special features of density, complexity, and abstractness which are associated with nominalization with which new members of the communities might not be familiar. To explore the possible distance between novice and established members regarding their awareness of this grammatical feature, the present study investigated the employment of nominalization in the writings of Iranian graduate students (both MA and PhD students) and experienced figures in applied linguistics. Forty five research articles in the discipline by the three groups of writers served as the corpus of the study. A rigorous analysis began by identifying and outlining nominalization instances manually through and per all rhetorical sections of the articles. The occurrences of the two types of nominal expressions was counted and normalized. So as to detect the possible significant differences between the samples, chi-square tests were run. The results revealed that the experienced writers used significantly more nominalization in their writings. However, although the total nominal expressions used in MA texts were more than those used in PhD texts, the difference turned out not to be significant. There were also similarities and variations in the ranking patterns of the two types of nominalization in four rhetorical sections of the three groups of the articles. It can be concluded that the differences might reflect the distance between the novice and the established authors regarding their awareness of the importance of nominalization in academic writing. The implications of the study for EAP courses were also discussed.

This research intends to explore the efficacious English teachers’ goals and strategies to effectively manage their own as well as their students’ emotions. The data of the study included interviews with 22 English teachers and 92 diary journals kept by 12 teachers who were among the top 20% of ELTEI (ELT teacher efficacy instrument) scorers and identified as efficacious English teachers. The results indicated that teachers’ goals for regulating their positive emotions included maintaining authority in relation to students, presenting unbiased teacher character, and enhancing teaching effectiveness. For regulating negative emotions, the goals included maintaining the teacher and students’ mental health, promoting teacher-student relationships, and reinforcing the image of teachers as moral guides. Teachers also used a variety of antecedent-focused and response-focused strategies hierarchically for effective emotion management including situation selection, situation modification, attention deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation. The findings were discussed with reference to the role of culture in emotion regulation and effectiveness of different sub-strategies. The results may promise some implications for teacher education programs and teacher educators about the inclusion of professional development opportunities for EFL teachers in terms of effective emotion management