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Dynamic assessment (DA), premised on Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory (SCT), constitutes a valuable venue for language teachers to promote the dialectical praxis and awareness of language assessment and teaching in the EFL context. In spite of the surge of interest in the importance of DA in assessing the dynamically emergent abilities , little has been written down regarding EFL teachers' attitudes toward DA. The current study attempted to fill that void by unearthing Iranian EFL teachers' beliefs about DA and also to determine if there is a statistically significant difference between university and language institute teachers' attitudes with regard to DA. To this end, forty Iranian EFL teachers in the two contexts (i.e., universities and language institutes) were selected through purposive and snowball sampling procedures. Adopting an exploratory design, the researchers collected the data through an Email interview. The results of the Chi-square tests indicated that there is no significant difference in the attitudes of university and language institute teachers toward DA, and both groups held a positive attitude toward it. In addition, the content analysis of the data resulted in the emergence of three major themes namely, teachers' classroom assessment practices, EFL teacher's attitudes toward DA, and impediments to applying DA principles in EFL classes. The findings of this study cater for implications for teachers to voice their concerns about the edifice of language testing and assessment in Iran.

This study set out to check the addressing behavior within men’s and women’s talk in the written conversations in English language textbook series titled ‘New Interchange book’ by Richards, Hull and Proctor, (1998) from Cambridge University Press. In line with this aim, the present researchers initially prepared descriptive tables for both formal and informal contexts in three theme categories (Social, Cultural & Economic) vis a vis four case appropriations (men*men, men*women, women*men, women*women). The distributions of interlocutors were coded through content analysis techniques. The major findings indicated that the highest percentage of detected address terms belonged to pronouns (67.7%). The proportions for gender appropriations between interlocutors for this address term showed that the case condition with women to men (52.3%) and men to women (36.4%) had the highest rates as compared with other cases. Then, in the final stage, the datasets were scrutinized in terms of theories on gender disparity in the instructional materials. This paper has some pedagogical implications in terms of addressing term inequality as mapped on gender status within ELT books, which might indirectly change the balance against full and rich contexts for effective learning to occur.

The effect of assessment types (self, peer, and teacher) on the EFL writing strategies development was examined in this study. Sixty upper-intermediate EFL learners at Qazvin Islamic university in four groups (one control and three experimental groups) were studied. One-way ANOVA checked homogeneity of the groups prior to the treatments and, then, the participants’ records and diaries were employed to gather data. Explanatory and descriptive analyses were implemented to analyze and classify the strategies the EFL learners picked up. This provided the type, frequency, and percentage of the strategies the participants mostly employed. The results revealed that the experimental groups, namely, self-assessment group, peer assessment group, and teacher assessment group employed more cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies than the control group. Affective strategies were more appealing to the control group. Focusing on the diction of the words, concentrating on the complex structures used by different writers, and making use of the structures the participants became interested in or found suitable were the most frequently referred to strategies. Teaching strategies the participants more picked up in this study might enhance EFL learners’ writing development at TEFL centers.

The present study, following Vygotskyan Sociocultural theory in education, and inspired by Rogoff’s conceptualization (1995, 2003) of development, aimed at conceptual development of in-service EFL teachers. To this end, two Iranian EFL teachers with pseudonyms (Tara and Sara) were selected as participants of the study. The participating teachers were first taught the sociocultural concepts related to language, teaching, and learning taken from Johnson (2009) and Rogoff’s (2003) mediatory model of development in six workshops through dialogic mediation. The data for the study comprised two semi-structured interviews, and three video-recording of critical reflection of each teacher on their video-taped classroom behavior. The recordings and transcripts were analyzed using Hatch’s (2002) procedure for interpretive analysis. The results of the study showed that participating teachers, over a process of struggle with their past experiences, gradually replaced their old everyday concepts such as grammatical accuracy, correct samples, and teacher interruption with new scientific concepts such as grammatical apprenticeship, guided grammatical participation, and grammatical appropriation through assisted participation. The results of present study can be illuminating for teacher educators and teacher education programs which have aimed at changing the classroom practice of in-service teachers

متن هر سندی با توجه به هدفی که از آن انتظار می رود، متشکل از جملاتی است که از نظر اصول گفتار به منزله ابزاری هستند که برای نیل به یک هدف خاص از آن ها استفاده می شود. در این مقاله ویژگی های ارتباطی جملاتی مورد تجزیه و تحلیل قرارمی گیرد که در آن ها از فعل «درخواست کردن» استفاده شده است. جملات نمونه از بین آن دسته از متون حقوقی انتخاب شده است که تشکیل دهنده مجموعه قوانین منطقه ای هستند. بر همین اساس، در این کار تحقیقی بخش نامه ها و مقررات به عنوان نمونه متون اداری، اظهارنامه ها و اقرارنامه ها، درخواست ها، سفارش نامه ها، استعلام ها، معرفی نامه ها، آگهی ها، یادداشت های اداری و مانند این ها به عنوان نمونه متونی که بار اطلاع رسانی دارند، برای تجزیه و تحلیل انتخاب شده اند. برای توصیف دقیق و کامل نحوه شکل گیری زنجیره گفتار در چارچوب هدف تعیین شده در این مقاله، عواملی که به نحوی در شکل گیری جملات انگیزشی دخیل و مؤثر هستند نیز بررسی شده است. از نظر عوامل محیطی، جملاتی انتخاب شده اند که در موقعیت گفتار رسمی به کار می روند. از نظر مشروط بودن، آن دسته از جملاتی انتخاب شده اند که جنبه خلاقانه دارند. مهم ترین نکته ای که در انتخاب نمونه متن ها لحاظ شده است، آزادی عمل مخاطب یا گیرنده، تأثیرگذاری و سطح متون است؛ زیرا این ویژگی ها با توجه به هدف یک سند ممکن است در اسناد گوناگون با همدیگر تفاوت داشته و تعیین کننده سطح استاندارد بودن یک متن باشند.

Hedging academic claims has been recognized as one of integral pragmatic features of academic writing in which most EFL academic writers seem to face substantial problems. Explicit instruction has been proposed by some scholars as an effective approach to make EFL writers aware of the importance, different forms, and pragmatic functions of hedging devices some of which are polysemous and polypragmatics (e.g., Hyland 1996a). The present study with the aim of shedding more light on the effectiveness of explicit instruction in improving the pragmatic knowledge of Iranian EFL learners in terms of hedging devices, investigates the acquisition and use of English modal auxiliaries as hedging strategies via applying a direct teaching strategy in the classroom. To this end a sample of 37 undergraduate students majoring in different fields of study were recruited and assigned into a control and experimental group. Explicit instruction of the modal auxiliaries as hedging resources was applied for the treatment group while the control group received only the regular academic writing instruction. A pretest and a posttest were administered to the two groups. The descriptive analysis of the scores as well as the results of the t-tests revealed a significant progress in the participants’ linguistic and pragmatic knowledge of modal auxiliaries as hedges in the treatment group. The results also indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group in acquiring and using modal verbs to hedge their claims. The findings of the study provide insightful implications for the administrators of educational programs.

Universities require highly qualified and committed instructors to carry out the significant tasks of educating the future generation of the society. The primary interest of this study was to explore the construct of teacher commitment to determine its dimensions and components and finally design EFL Teachers’ Professional Commitment Questionnaire. First, through a thorough analysis of the available literature as well as a semi-structured interview, the core dimensions and components were opted. Then, in the second qualitative phase, the researcher designed the early draft of a structured questionnaire which was handed into 25 experts. Content Validity Ratio was computed to ensure validity. Subsequently, the modified draft of the EFL Teachers’ Professional Commitment Questionnaire was designed and administered to 70 EFL university instructors to investigate the validity and reliability of the instrument employing Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling. As a result, three dimensions of Commitment to Students, Commitment to Profession, and Commitment to University along with 10 components were confirmed. The practical implication of this study is a validated EFL Teachers’ Professional Commitment Questionnaire performing as an evaluative tool to assess the level of teachers’ commitment with respect to their commitment to students, university, and profession in the EFL academic context of Iran.