درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present study investigated whether word learning and retention in a second language are contingent upon a task's involvement load, i.e., the amount of need, search, and evaluation the task imposes. Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) contend that tasks with higher degrees of these three components induce higher involvement load, and are, therefore, more effective for word learning. To test this claim, 64 Iranian intermediate EFL learners were selected based on their performance on the Preliminary English Test (PET). The participants were randomly assigned to two equal groups. Each group completed different vocabulary learning tasks that varied in the amount of involvement they induced. The tasks were jigsaw task (Group A) and information gap task (Group B). During the ten treatment sessions, recall and retention of the 100 unfamiliar target words were tested through immediate and delayed posttest. Data were analyzed using repeated measure ANOVA. The results indicated that learners benefited more from jigsaw task with higher involvement load. This study supported the Involvement Load Hypothesis, suggesting that higher involvement induced by the task resulted in more effective recall; however, no significant difference was observed between the two tasks in the retention of the unknown words.

An interesting area of psycholinguistic inquiry is to discover the way morphological structures are stored in the human mind and how they are retrieved during comprehension or production of language. The current study probed into what goes on in the mind of EFL learners when processing derivational morphology and how English and Persian derivational suffixes are processed. 60 Iranian EFL learners at intermediate and advanced levels of proficiency whose proficiency level were determined through Oxford Quick Placement Test, participated in masked priming experiments using E-prime software. Two separate priming tasks in Persian and English were conducted during the course of this study. The target words were primed in three ways: identity (careful""careful), related (care""careful) and control primes (desire""careful). Participants’ reaction times were measured by E-prime software and were fed into SPSS software for further analysis. The results indicated that Proficiency plays a role in the way derivational morphology is processed, because at lower proficiency levels more decomposition was detected while more proficient participants utilized more whole-word representation. Furthermore, Persian learners of English processing of the derived words could not be assigned strictly to decomposition or whole-word representations in the mind. What seems more plausible to assume is that highly frequent words (whether base or suffix frequency) as well as derived words with more productive suffixes are stored as whole words but lower base and morpheme frequency ones and those with suffixes having less productivity are decomposed. These findings lend further support to dual route model.

This study was an attempt to evaluate the undergraduate TEFL program at Farhangian University. The university specializes in educating prospective teachers and the program is important since it is expected to equip the student teachers with the knowledge and skills necessary for qualified teachers. Hence, in this study, measures were taken to investigate the merits and demerits of the implemented TEFL program and explore the domains in which the program needs to be improved. The study assessed the program from the perspectives of 220 student teachers, 32 teacher educators, and 12 heads of departments and experts including the university deans, deputies, and research and teaching staff, through using three instruments, i.e. questionnaires, interviews, and observations in a mixed methods design .The findings indicated that the TEFL program did not address some educational and administrative needs as the participants believed that they were not enriched with the necessary skills, the practice of the learned theories, problem solving, critical thinking, flexibility, and innovation. Furthermore, this study demonstrated several theory- practice gaps in the curriculum.

Having witnessed the unprecedented prevalence of online education during the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, the present research was motivated to explore the challenges facing an EFL teacher throughout an online English course of intermediate level. To this aim, a process-tracing approach (Checkel, 2006) was employed to unravel the causal mechanisms involved in the beginning, middle, and end of the course. The results showed that deficient technological resources caused the greatest challenges throughout the course, especially in the initial and mid-sessions. Also, the two other causal categories, human and content resources, were at their peak at the beginning of the course and were no longer noticeable at the end of the course. The most troublesome challenges the teacher faced were platform limitations, internet connection, and human resources’ unpreparedness for online education. Furthermore, the teacher’s and most students’ technological knowledge, as well as their media literacy, increased by the end of the course, but some students’ rather slow adaptation to the sudden online environment challenged the teacher during the course. Finally, suggestions were made to prevent these challenges or handle them effectively upon occurrence, especially in developing countries, where the required infrastructure for online education is lacking, and the majority of teachers, students, and institutions might not be yet adequately prepared for the online mode of teaching and learning languages.

The relationship between language and culture has become a rich source of inquiry in the context of English language teaching. Learning materials can depict cultural content in different cultural senses, namely aesthetic, sociological, semantic, and pragmatic. The present study aimed to investigate the way cultural aspects are represented in the reading and dialog sections of global ( American English File) and localized ( The ILI English Series) ELT textbooks which are widely used in Iran. The framework adopted to analyze the cultural contents of the materials was Adaskou, Britten, and Fahsi (1990) to explore how culture in aesthetic and sociological senses is realized in the series. The findings demonstrated that more emphasis was put on the sociological sense and that this aspect of the culture dominated the aesthetic sense in the cultural contents of the two series. The cultural and culture-free contents represented in the two global and localized series were found to be entirely different in frequency and sense realization. Most of the contents in the localized series were culture-free, while the culture-free contents in the global series were reasonably less than the sociological and aesthetic senses. Additionally, the findings revealed that compared with the worldwide series, the localized textbook was less representative of cultural features in sociological and aesthetic senses. The results imply that ELT materials should be inclusive enough regarding the sociological and aesthetic senses of culture to help learners get engaged in the development of their cultural understanding.

Gaining insights into the learners’ individual characteristics such as beliefs about language learning and their relationship with learning strategies is essential for planning effective language instruction. Thus, the present study investigated the relationship between beliefs about language learning and learning strategy use in Iranian high school students. This study also compared the correlation of the two variables between males and females and monolingual and bilingual students. The strategy inventory for language learning (SILL) and the beliefs about language learning inventory (BALLI) were used to collect data from four hundred and sixty-two high school students from different cities of the country. Descriptive analyses, Pearson r correlation, and the Fisher z-transformation test, were used to analyze the data. The results revealed that the students used metacognitive strategies most and compensation and affective strategies least. Also, they held strong motivational beliefs about English language learning. Significant positive correlations were found between beliefs and strategy categories. The strongest correlation was found between the students’ metacognitive strategies and their motivation and expectations. The findings revealed no significant difference between the correlation coefficients of monolinguals and bilinguals, and males and females in terms of their language learning beliefs and strategies. Regarding the pedagogical implications of the results, it is discussed that knowledge of students’ language learning beliefs and their preferred strategies can lead teachers and educational authorities toward more informed instructional choices.

This study investigated the effect of role-play and simulation approach on Malaysian Polytechnic engineering students’ ESL oral communication skills. In addition, the study examined the students’ perceptions of the effect of the role-play and simulation on their oral communication skills. A mixed method design was employed, using both quantitative and qualitative data collection approaches. The quantitative data were collected from the quasi-experimental study (n=100). The data were collected using a set of questionnaires, a pre and post-test. The data from the questionnaires were analysed using descriptive statistics (percentages and means). The results showed that there was a significant difference between the pre-test and the post-test scores of the role-play and simulation group compared to the traditional group. The findings indicated that the students in the role-play and simulation group had performed better in the post-test compared to the pre-test after the exposure to the role-play and simulation approach in the ESL oral communication skills classes. An implication of the study is that role-play and simulation approach can serve as a possible strategy to improve students’ ESL oral communication skills.